A book of dreams : a novel / by Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo.

There is Angela, who dreams strange dreams and keeps a notebook in which she writes tales and sketches which may someday become a novel. And there are Ruben, Ariel, Debbie, Luis and Cora, whose lives occasionaly intersect, and who connect subtly with one another in their own dreams and in Angela's dreams and sketches. Hidalgo's new novel combines dreams, urban legends, "romantic realistic" sketches and tales, short fragments from the works of other writers, and straightforward narratives. But for all its affinity to the postmodern pastiche, its plot is the traditional one of the search, the quest. And for all its haunting, evanescent quality, it is curiously anchored in the contemporary Philippine scene, where basketball players and showbiz personalities dominate politics, young drug addicts rape their own classmates, and clerks peddle memorial plans to augment their meager wages, a world shot through with both beauty and danger, a world of miracle and poetry and inescapable violence.