Love, Chaos, and Thermodynamics: Haribon Publishing Announces A Series of Seemingly Unrelated Love Stories by Lorelie Defensor

It begins on a night in the year 2000, under a sky crowded with stars.

A teenage girl sits on a cement tire in a provincial schoolyard in the Philippines, next to a schoolmate she used to just see around during club activities, watching planets gather low in the western dark. Then summer arrives and swallows everything. There are no cell phones in her world, no way to reach him across the long vacation months. All she can do is replay that single night in her head, over and over, until — in the words of the manuscript now sitting with our editors — “the memory felt worn thin.”

What happens to a moment like that? Does it fade into the ordinary noise of growing up, or does it quietly bend the course of an entire life, the way a single decimal can change the answer to an equation?

That question is the beating heart of the book we are announcing today. Haribon (HRBN) Publishing is proud to share that we have signed A Series of Seemingly Unrelated Love Stories, the debut novel of Filipino author and illustrator Lorelie Defensor. The manuscript is now in editing. The release date has not been announced — and for now, we are keeping it that way.

A Love Story Written by a Physics Major

Lorelie Defensor holds a degree in B.S. Physics from the University of the Philippines Diliman, and it shows in the best possible way. She describes her novel, in her own words, as “Chaos Theory meets To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” — a coming-of-age story where the language of science and the language of longing turn out to be the same language. This is a book about love, chaos, and thermodynamics, and it means all three words literally.

The finished manuscript runs past 110,000 words across a prologue and nineteen chapters, following one protagonist — a girl named Claire — through three arcs of her life. It opens in a crowded family home in the early 2000s, where college dreams are weighed against tuition money and a mother packs baon before sunrise. It moves through the corridors of a strict Catholic academy, through military drills and scented stationery and stolen glances across a courtyard. And it eventually arrives at the National Institute of Physics at UP Diliman, where academic ambition and the unpredictable trajectory of the heart collide in earnest.

Claire’s world is one that many Filipino readers will recognize down to the smell of the kitchen: TJ hotdogs frying at 4:30 in the morning, the early jeepney to campus, DOST scholarship exams that decide futures, the quiet arithmetic of a family choosing a course based on what their pockets can handle. This is not nostalgia for decoration’s sake. In this novel, the era is the point — a love story set in the last years before cell phones, when a whole summer of silence between two people was not a choice but a fact of life, and a single night under the stars had months to grow into something enormous.

Seemingly Unrelated — Until the String Is Pulled

The title is a promise, and it is also a puzzle. A Series of Seemingly Unrelated Love Stories presents itself as exactly that: distinct stories, distinct loves, moments that appear to have nothing to do with one another. The novel’s wager is that they do. Small decisions ripple. A missed word in one chapter tilts a life three chapters later. People drift into Claire’s orbit, drift out, and return transformed — or reveal that they never really left.

Readers of a scientific bent will recognize the butterfly effect at work; readers of a romantic bent will simply recognize their own lives. How the three arcs finally connect — what the single thread running through all of them turns out to be — is something we are not going to tell you. Some equations you have to solve yourself.

An Author Who Draws Her Own Worlds

Part of what makes this book unusual is how much of it comes from one pair of hands. Lorelie is both the novelist and the illustrator behind the book’s cover concept — a hand-drawn, watercolor-and-line-art design in the style of a personal sketchbook, in which the scattered scenes of Claire’s life are tied together, quite literally, by a single string. Early glimpses of the concept, shared on the book’s official Facebook page, show couples, bicycles, guitars, and letters floating around an embrace at the center — chaos, arranged with intention.

This is not Lorelie’s first book. She previously wrote The Girl Who Loves Caterpillars, a children’s title published by Book of Life Publication Philippines. Now based in Malaysia, she writes with the particular clarity of a Filipina looking homeward — near enough to render the world of her childhood in vivid, affectionate detail, far enough to see the patterns in it. The manuscript is currently being refined with developmental editor Arvin Abejo Mangohig ahead of its production at HRBN.

What We Can Tell You — and What We Can’t

Here is what is confirmed. The novel will be published by Haribon (HRBN) Publishing and will be available worldwide as an eBook and paperback through Amazon, with availability at Barnes & Noble expected through expanded distribution, as well as local availability at the HRBN Shop. The cover you may have glimpsed online is a concept, not the final reveal. The story is finished; the polishing has begun.

Here is what we are keeping to ourselves, for now: the release date, the final cover, and the answer to the only question that matters — whether the girl on the cement tire ever gets the ending she rehearsed in her head all summer.

If you want to be there when those answers arrive, follow the book’s official Facebook page, where Lorelie shares sneak peeks, behind-the-scenes art, and updates in her own voice, and keep an eye on our catalog and our authors page, where Lorelie Defensor now joins the HRBN roster. The stars aligned once, on a night in 2000. We suspect they are about to do it again.