Now available in all major Philippine bookstores

Fully Booked | Bibliarch | Pandayan Bookshop | National Book Store | Powerbooks | and provincial outlets

Order online via Lazada

Award-winning author Eliza Victoria mixes magic with the mundane in this special concoction of 16 short stories. A girl meets a young man with the legs of a chicken. A boy is employed by a goddess running a pawnshop. A group of teenagers are trapped in an enchanted forest for 900 days. A man finds himself in an MRT station beyond Taft, a station that was not supposed to exist. A student claims to have seen the last few digits of pi. Someone’s sister gets abducted by mermaids.

Includes stories that have appeared in the critically acclaimed anthologies Philippine Speculative Fiction and Alternative Alamat, and stories that have won prizes in the Philippines Free Press Literary Awards and the Amelia Lapeña-Bonifacio Literary Contest.

Take this bottle of storm clouds and explore the worlds within.

What readers are saying:

“If there is one thing [Eliza Victoria's] first collection of short stories, A Bottle of Storm Clouds, has shown, it’s that her sensibility as a news-oriented person can be a factor in weaving stories that feel so relevant and Filipino — characters and settings beyond the American lovestruck vampires and British lightning-scarred wizards Filipino bookworms know.”

- Jerald Uy, Rappler contributor

“…imagined worlds become springboards to explore universal themes of loss and regret in award-winning writer Eliza Victoria’s A Bottle of Storm Clouds (Visprint, Inc). From fantasy (‘Ana’s Little Pawnshop on Makiling St.’) to science fiction (‘Night Out’), Victoria explores parallel dimensions, myths come to life, and everything else in between in this short story collection…It’s a heady dose of myth and magic that will make you wonder why you haven’t explored more Filipino speculative fiction before.”

- Chris Mariano, writer, book reviewer, and AVA.ph contributor

“There’s something interesting and entirely different in each story — some of them were creepy, most of them sad, but all had really good fantasy elements that stretched my imagination wider than it did before. I liked how Eliza hinged most of the stories with real human experiences like grief and sadness, family and friendship and love and even selfishness and life crisis.”

- Tina Matanguihan, book reviewer

“Have you experienced buying a book for what you thought it is but it pleasantly turned into something else? A Bottle of Storm Clouds by Eliza Victoria is like that with me. I thought it is a short story collection about, given the cover, Philippine folklore flawlessly interspersed in a contemporary setting. It turns out to be what its title says—16 stories about individuals with bottled-up storms that change them in so many ways.”

- Nancy Cudis, book reviewer

“The characters in A Bottle of Storm Clouds are that real. You love them, fear them, admire them, pity them, cry for them. They evoke something from you, they demand a reaction. For a brief, magical moment, the characters become so real to you that you can all but touch them. Although there are some characters you’d really not want to encounter, especially on moonless nights.”

- Janina Gillian Santos, book reviewer

“…I immensely enjoyed this book: the stories were well-written, they weren’t predictable, and they involved themes and ideas that are close to home.”

- Marginalia

“This collection of short stories goes in such a wonderful range of directions. It portrays the familiar: school, kids, family issues, but also delves into worlds strange and fantastic. I have liked Eliza’s writing since I first read it, and this first book of hers is something I have been immensely impressed by.”

- Carljoe Javier,  author of The Kobayashi Maru of Love (Visprint, 2012)

Publisher: VISPRINT

Release Date: August 13, 2012

Format: Print paperback

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Reviews:

Rappler | AVA.ph | simple clockwork | Dibuho Pilipinas | One More Page | Marginalia | YTM | Flipside