Manila Ripple

Slow Bum (Ballantine), a novel set in mid-eighties Manila by twenty-one-year-old Sabina Murray, may seem at first like one more first-person chronicle of disaffected rich kids sleepwalking through smoky clubs. But Murray's cool understanding of the knotty social and sexual nuances of upper-class Manila—which, she insists, has changed little since Marcos—makes the book more than a Bright Lights, Big Palm Leaves. Born in the States, Murray grew up in Australia and Manila (her mother is Filipino), and went to college at Mount Holyoke, where she wrote Slow Bum as her senior thesis. "Everywhere I belong, " says Murray, who's writing a second novel in Maine,

"and everywhere I'm an outsider."

BEN BRANTLEY