About Before the Rain
• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (August 7, 2012)
In a voice haunting and filled with longing, Before the Rain tells the story of love unexpected, its fragile bounds and subtle perils. As a newspaper editor in the ’80s, Luisita Torregrosa lived her career. Enter Elizabeth, a striking, reserved, and elusive writer with whom Torregrosa falls deeply in love. Their story—irresistible romance, overlapping ambitions, and fragile union—unfolds as the narrative shifts to the Philippines and the fall of Ferdinand Marcos. There, on that beautiful, troubled island, the couple creates a world of their own, while covering political chaos and bloody upheavals. What was effortless abroad becomes less idyllic when they return to the United States, and their ending becomes as surprising and revealing as their beginning. Torregrosa captures the way love transforms those who experience it for an unforgettable, but often too brief, time. This book is distinguished not only by its strong, unique, and conflicted heroines, but also by Torregrosa’s lyrical portrait of the Philippines and the even more exotic heart of intimacy.
“Before the Rain takes us to the exotic and pillaged places of the earth, through rain-swept streets and wine-soaked nights and into the hearts of two passionate, revolutionary women who dared to love and lose; and lived to dare again. A wild, brave, truthful story.” –Carole DeSanti, author of The Unruly Passions of Eugénie R
“What is more exotic and unknowable than love? … Spare, precise and soulful, Before the Rain is an epic travelogue of the heart. It has the urgency of a front page news story, but then, no matter what is happening in the world, love is always revolutionary when it happens to you.” —Bob Morris, author of Assisted Loving
“A friendship between two journalists covering the Philippines Revolution of 1986 deepens into a passionate, far-flung love affair in this serenely capable work…as Torregrosa fashions in her oblique and beautiful fashion, the two women could never really acknowledge their love publicly, underscoring a sad truth to this memorable work.” —Publishers Weekly
Check out the website for Before the Rain.
About Luisita López Torregrosa
Luisita López Torregrosa is the author of The Noise of Infinite Longing and was an editor at the New York Times. As a special correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle she reported firsthand on the coup attempts against President Corazon Aquino, the communist insurgency in the Philippines, and the protests in South Korea that led to the fall of authoritarian rule. Her articles also have appeared in Vanity Fair, New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler, and Vogue.
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Luisita’s Tour Stops
Wednesday, August 22nd: Unabridged Chick
Monday, September 3rd: Dreaming in Books
Thursday, September 6th: A Reader of Fictions
Monday, September 10th: Between the Covers
Tuesday, September 18th: Book Club Classics!
Monday, September 24th: Sophisticated Dorkiness
Tuesday, September 25th: Bonjour, Cass!
Wednesday, September 26th: Silver & Grace
Friday, September 28th: Raging Bibliomania
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