In Character, preeminent scholar and fiction writer Caroline S. Hau offers a gallery of portraits of colorful characters, fictional and otherwise — from Rizal heroine Maria Clara to president's mistress Dovie Beams, from tidying expert Marie Kondo to kasambahay Eudocia Tomas Pulido, plus women warriors, tiger mothers, lifestyle gurus, bestselling authors, misbehaving presidents, an outlier country called the Philippines, and a serial killer or two. Testing and stretching the boundaries that constitute not only a sense of nation from our corner of the world but also the essay as amorphous style, this is Hau at her most wide-ranging and inventive.