‘Abakada: pronounced Ah-Bah-KAH-Da, the “indigenised” Filipino alphabet whittled down the Spanish abecedario and English alphabet to just twenty letters. It added a new digraph, Ng, to represent a particularly Filipino sound; and had no letter “F”, despite the Philippines being named after a Spanish prince, the future King Felipe II, who would never set foot in the archipelago.’

As a small child, Lara Day stopped speaking Tagalog, her Filipino mother tongue, because her English father couldn’t understand her. From this moment of loss, Abakada takes a spiralling journey across decades, continents and dialects, as Lara grows up in colonial Hong Kong to endure chronic fatigue in the UK, deadly protests in Thailand, an unplanned pandemic move to Australia – and terrible boyfriends around the world. 

From a remarkable writer whose career has taken her from Oxford to The Wall Street Journal, this is a memoir to savour. Told alphabetically, Abakada sifts through the pieces of life with humour and insight, weaving together family, voice and healing, to find a language all of its own.

Praise for Abakada:

‘Deeply wise, alive with feeling – a personal map of how to make peace with all the many selves we each hold, inventing along the way a whole new poetic language of longing and belonging.’

–Ceridwen Dovey, author of Blood Kin (Penguin Random House)

‘We tend to see identity as fragments of a broken pot, shards of shattered glass, or as pieces of a larger puzzle. Something about these metaphors implies that we are incomplete. But in Lara Day’s Abakada, identity becomes a mosaic: beautiful because it is varied, meaningful because it embraces a diversity of being. This is the same identity of notes in a song, of letters in a novel, of islands in an archipelago.’

–Carl Lorenz Cervantes, author of Sikodiwa (North Atlantic Books)

Australia & New Zealand: Pre-order Abakada (Simon & Schuster)

International: Pre-order Abakada (Readings)

Format: B+ paperback
ISBN: 9781764555852
Publishing: 2 March 2027