Samantha Sotto Yambao is a Manila novelist who writes speculative fiction about love, time, and the choices that haunt people, and she came to it almost by accident. She studied at the Ateneo de Manila and spent close to a decade in marketing before writing her debut three hours a day at a coffee shop in Manila while waiting to pick her son up from school, and selling it to Crown in New York at the end of 2009.

That debut, Before Ever After (2011), is a time-spanning romance about a widow who discovers her seemingly ageless husband may not be as dead, or as ordinary, as she believed. Drawing on her years living and traveling in Europe, it made her, by Philippine accounts, among the first Filipina novelists signed by a major New York house. Love and Gravity (2017) followed, connecting a present-day cellist with the young Isaac Newton across centuries; both early books bend time in the service of a love story, the shape her fiction keeps returning to.

Her breakout arrived in 2025 with Water Moon, published by Del Rey in the United States and by Transworld in Britain, where it was billed as a Sunday Times bestseller. Set in a hidden Tokyo pawnshop where customers trade away their regrets, it follows Hana Ishikawa through a mystical world, helped by a physicist named Keishin, after the shop is ransacked and her father disappears.

The novel found a wide readership and was shortlisted for the 2025 Adventure Writing Prize from the Wilbur and Niso Smith Foundation. Reviewers and readers reached for Studio Ghibli to describe its gentle, wondrous register; Sotto Yambao has said the book grew out of a Kyoto street and the pawnshops of the pandemic years. It was her first book published in Britain, and her widest release yet.

Her recurring subjects are love and memory, time and regret, and the magic hidden inside ordinary lives, written in a register closer to fable than to realism. Based in Manila, she has stayed in the Philippines through a career that now reaches readers around the world, and for a list of living Filipino authors, she is the one writing wonder for the widest audience.

Selected and fact-checked against Hardcover and Open Library.