It is the story of the Eduartes, the de Almogueiras, the Herreras, and their neighbor and occasional friends, the Ricaforts, trying to hold on to old and trusted rituals of daily life amidst the turbulence and upheaval in the last years of the nineteenth century in Manila.
It is a novel about ordinary people - of Tibor and Aurora, Masin and his cousin Subas, of Torcuato, the servant boy who knows no other existence, but who, in the end, establishes a kinship with the epical heroes of the nation because his sacrifice has not been less noble.
Amid the escalating madness of a regime gone berserk, an odd assortment of people - a senator, a young nationalist, a dispossessed farmer, a radical activist, a convent school girl, a Jesuit scholastic, including the Eduartes, the Herreras, and their friends - make their way along the labyrinthine corridors of greed and power.
In the Feast of the Innocents, we see the conclusion of the story of the Eduarte and Herrera families, who struggle to stay connected by means of their memories and the good they believe in, because these are the best weapons against the more sophisticated forms of present-day evil.
Their fortunes have blended with their country's history in a counterpoint with the national dreams: their great-grandfathers had fought in the Revolution and the Philippine–American War; their fathers had gone to Bataan to fight a hopeless defense of their homeland; and they themselves had waged a covert campaign against a dictatorship.