The Gangster of Love

“The Gangster of Love is elegant and smart, deftly capturing the pain of leaving a country behind and the struggle to adapt to a new one.” —The New York Times Book Review

From celebrated novelist Jessica Hagedorn, an electrifying novel about a Filipino-American family navigating a culture of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll

Rocky Rivera arrives in the U.S. from the Philippines the year that Jimi Hendrix dies. So begins a blazing coming-of-age story suffused with the tensions of immigration that finds Rocky moving from the counterculture of 1960s San Francisco to the extravagant 1980s Manhattan music scene.

The Gangster of Love tells the story of the Rivera family as they make their new life in the States, all the while haunted by the memory of the father and the homeland they left behind. Among its members are Rocky’s haughty mother, who has impulsively left her father; Voltaire, her brother, prone to heavy depression and odd friendships with strangers; and Rocky herself, unsure about sex and worshipful of her boyfriend, the guitar-playing Elvis Chang, who must learn to accept reality amidst the myths and lures of American success and idolatry.