Marga Ortigas

Marga Ortigas is an award-winning international journalist whose career spans 3 decades and 5 continents for 2 of the largest global news networks.

Since turning away from the camera and putting down the microphone, she has penned four highly acclaimed books, two literary novels (The House on Calle Sombra and God's Ashes) and two works of non-fiction examining the human condition (There are No Falling Stars in China and WTF?!: Woman Turning F*fty).

She continues to write with the urgency of a journalist and the intimacy of a poet.

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The House on Calle Sombra

Country: Philippines

Publisner Name: The House on Calle Sombra

Original Language: English

"The House on Calle Sombra" is a genre-defying novel that explores memory, identity, and intergenerational reckoning against the backdrop of post-colonial Manila.

Told through a shifting, mosaic-like structure that mirrors the elusive nature of memory itself, the story follows a grandson’s return to a crumbling ancestral home where silence, impotence, and half-told truths linger in every room.

As their once-esteemed family falls deeper into quiet ruin, the grandson begins to piece together the fractures in both his lineage and his country.

Set against the long shadows of colonialism, dictatorship, and social transformation, this atmospheric and richly layered novel examines how political and personal histories are inherited, distorted, and endured.

Spare, lyrical, and emotionally unflinching, "The House on Calle Sombra" speaks to the universal struggle of confronting what remains.

Though deeply rooted in a fictionalized Philippines, its portrayal of love, loss, and the fragile architectures of the self resonates across cultures—offering a profound meditation on the nature of truth, the cost of silence, and the private sacrifices made in the name of survival.