Who is Aurora Cordial? The girl with the closed eyes lying on the bed or the place from which the sun rises, as we are assured at the end of this book by the fading picture on the wall of a house?

Aurora Cordial is the diary of a journey to the Philippines, in which the author collects impressions, encounters, discoveries and thoughts. Parallel to the travelogue, the photographic notes crystallise into a second narrative: the biography of a family with the name of Cordial, scattered across the globe; a love story spanning the continents and whose strands come together in a province in the north east of the island nation.

In Aurora Cordial, Fantur describes an inner state in which dream and reality, concepts and facts are permanently superimposed over each other. And the thing that keeps the longing alive – in spite of all doubt – is faith: faith that the yearned-for place beyond the ocean really exists, even if only in the imagination.