Penguin Random House SEA releases two Filipino books that could not be more different from each other

By Andy — 2026-07-10 — book recommendations Southeast Asia

I walked past Fully Booked last week and saw them shelved next to each other. One book angry. One book about love in Florence.

The thing is, Penguin Southeast Asia didn't do this by accident.

J.C. Punongbayan's "Twin Plagues: How Duterte and Covid-19 Wrecked the Philippine Economy" came out June 30. It's dense. Policy data, six years of governance failure, the argument that the Duterte administration damaged the economy before the pandemic even arrived—Covid-19 didn't create the problem, it exposed it. Punongbayan, he's an associate professor at the University of the Philippines School of Economics, spent years writing about this stuff for Rappler under a column called "In This Economy." He doesn't soften the argument. He doesn't try.

This is politically charged work.

Usually books like this get published by academic presses and read by people who already agree with them. Quietly. Penguin SEA put a mass-market distribution network behind it instead—Fully Booked, National Bookstore, Kinokuniya across Asia, Amazon globally. That's reach. Someone at a mall who's never taken an economics class can pick this up now. That actually matters more than it sounds.

The other book is different in almost every way.

Kyra Ysabel's "The Love Letters of Via Lullina" is a debut romance. The protagonist, Isla Mendoza, she's a Filipino writer who finds herself in a Florentine bookshop—actually, that's not quite right, it's a secondhand bookshop, which is different, more specific somehow—and she finds a letter addressed to her. Written by Luca Rossi, a grumpy Italian chef. Genre romance. Filipino lead. Published by a major regional imprint.

Why this one matters just as much

The Southeast Asian publishing market hasn't historically made space for local voices in genre fiction. Romance especially. When a debut Filipino romance author gets published by Penguin SEA instead of a small local press, she gets shelved next to international titles. Kinokuniya in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur stock it. Amazon gives it a page. That infrastructure doesn't usually land behind a debut.

What Penguin SEA is doing here—more or less—is making a case. Filipino writing belongs in the same regional conversation as Singaporean literary fiction or Indonesian commercial titles. That's it. That's the statement.

The publisher has been expanding the Filipino list gradually. These two July releases sit at either end: serious nonfiction with a political edge and commercial genre fiction with broad appeal. You don't need to read both to get what's being said.

But they're on the same shelf. Same week. Same imprint.

That tells you something about what Penguin SEA thinks the Filipino reading public is ready for. As far as I can tell, it's overdue.

Tags: Penguin Random House SEA, J.C. Punongbayan, Kyra Ysabel, Twin Plagues Duterte economy book, Filipino romance novel 2026, Southeast Asia publishing Filipino authors