A short story collection as relentlessly intense and darkly compelling as Batacan’s debut, the Filipino crime landmark Smaller and Smaller Circles F.H. Batacan’s first novel, Smaller and Smaller Circles, was an instant classic when it was published in 1999, a masterpiece of Filipino crime that won the Philippine Book Award. In this, her second work of fiction, she gives us a far-ranging collection that explores the darkest corners of human experience, depicting with pitch black humor the systems of class and politics that her characters are trapped in, and the moments violence—accidental or otherwise—that can, at any moment, shatter their lives. The driver for a wealthy family witnesses the aftermath of the disappearance of the family’s twelve-year-old son. A field investigator for the World Health Organization travels the world giving presentations about a biomedical enzyme that will lead to the extinction of the human race. And Father Augusto Saenz, the Jesuit priest and forensic anthropologist from Smaller and Smaller Circles, returns to investigate the murder of a woman whose secretive life holds the key to her death. Sure to cement Batacan’s status as a crime writer of global status, Accidents Happen is a probing and relentless series of dark excursions into worlds where the smallest moments are infused with life and vibrating with menace, and death is always close at hand.
Author
Maria Felisa H. Batacan is a Filipino journalist and a writer of crime and mystery fiction. Her work has been published in the Philippines and abroad under the name F.H. Batacan. She was a fellow at the 1996 Dumaguete National Writers' Workshop. Batacan worked in the Philippine intelligence community and then became a broadcast journalist. She attended the University of the Philippines, where she pursued a master's degree in Arts Studies. In 1999 her manuscript, Smaller and Smaller Circles, won the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature Grand Prize for the English Novel. This novel was published in 2002 by the University of the Philippines Press. Although most Filipino English-language fiction works garner a single print run of only 1,000 copies,Smaller and Smaller Circles had been reprinted four times by the year 2006, for a total of 6,000 copies. The novel was one of the first Filipino works of crime fiction. The novel also won the 2002 Manila Critics’ Circle National Book Award and the Madrigal-Gonzales Best First Book Award in 2003. In 2008, she won 1st prize in the English short story category of the Philippines Free Press Literary Awards.
