A new book published in the United States in February 2002 features Montgomery Clift as an inspirational figure.

Letters to Montgomery Clift, by Noel Alumit, is published by MacAdam Cage. It's set in the Philippines and is billed as a novel of endurance and hope as well as a tale of growing up, coming out and going home.

The story centres on Bong Bong Luwad, who is living with his Auntie Yuna in Los Angeles, far from his Philippine village, the Marcos regime and his mother who helped him escape but who has disappeared. Bong Bong and Auntie Yuna spend their days watching old movies on TV and writing pleading letters to the saints and to dead relatives.

One night Bong Bong finds a new saint while watching a late night movie: Montgomery Clift. He's playing a soldier who helps a lost boy find his mother in The Search. Can Monty do the same for him?

He gets out a pencil and paper and thus begins a series of extraordinary events that carry him from boyhood, to adolescence, through sexual awakening, madness, and finally back to the place where he can begin his life again.

The author was born in the Philippines and earned his bachelor's degree of fine arts in drama from the University of Southern California. He studied playwriting at the David Henry Hwang Writers Institute at East West Players.

His one-man show, The Rice Room: Scenes From a Bar, was voted one of the best solo shows of the year by the San Francisco Bay Guardian and played to packed houses in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia and other cities. He recently premiered his latest solo show, Master of the (Miss) Universe.

Letters To Montgomery Clift is his first novel and is on sale priced $25 hardback from MacAdam/Cage. If you wish to buy it in the UK, click here to buy it at Amazon for £15.99.

You can read an interview with Noel Alumit here