Manila by Nick Joaquin — Joaquin was the Philippines' greatest prose writer in English, and though this essay-history roams across the whole city, it illuminates the Spanish and American layers that shaped places like Parañaque's old town. Dense and digressive, but irreplaceable for understanding what Manila was and what it keeps trying to be.
Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn — Hagedorn's novel is set in 1950s Manila and follows a kaleidoscope of characters across the city's social strata — movie stars, politicians, street hustlers, American servicemen. The Manila she captures — gaudy, hierarchical, American-influenced, deeply Catholic — is recognisable in Parañaque today. One of the essential novels about the Philippines in English.
In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines by Stanley Karnow — Parañaque's modern shape — the sprawl, the highway infrastructure, the English-language signs — is partly a legacy of American colonial rule. Karnow's Pulitzer Prize-winning history traces that relationship from 1898 to the fall of the Marcos dictatorship, and makes the built environment of cities like Parañaque legible in a new way.
The World Is an Apple by Alberto Florentino — a short play rather than a novel, but widely taught in Philippine schools and widely known. Set in a squatter community in Manila, it deals with poverty, dignity, and the pressure of city life on ordinary families. The conditions it describes — informal settlements near major infrastructure, the grinding arithmetic of survival — are still visible in the margins of Parañaque's airport corridor.