Accidents Happen and Other Stories

From the master of Filipino crime fiction, a genre-bending collection that documents murders, disappearances, and acts of violence in stories that range from procedural crime to horror to near-future noir 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 fiction that won the Philippine National Book Award. In this extraordinary and far-ranging story collection, she 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 of violence—accidental or otherwise—that can, at any moment, shatter their lives. In particular, Batacan shines an unsparing light on the epidemic of violence against women in the Philippines. When a wealthy politician’s twelve-year-old son disappears, the family’s driver witnesses the aftermath. A field investigator for the World Health Organization travels the globe 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 confirm Batacan’s status as a crime writer of global status, Accidents Happen is a relentless exploration of worlds where the smallest moments are infused with life and vibrating with menace, and death is always close at hand.