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Brother Brontë

A Novel

ebook
0 of 2 copies available
Wait time: About 8 weeks
0 of 2 copies available
Wait time: About 8 weeks

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by the Los Angeles Times, Town & Country, and Alta

"Flores's style has an exhilarating punk, D.I.Y. aplomb; it's as if he feels he's inventing literature for the first time." —Mark Leyner, The New York Times Book Review
"Flores's fiction possesses the aspect of a dream." —David L. Ulin, The Atlantic

"This crazy cakey world-making of Fernando A. Flores is all of literature, wide, plaintive, melancholy and full of feminist fellow joyousness and ways. Hated this world ending, I want more." —Eileen Myles
Two women fight to save their dystopian border town—and literature—in this gonzo near-future adventure.
The year is 2038, and the formerly bustling town of Three Rivers, Texas, is a surreal wasteland. Under the authoritarian thumb of its tech industrialist mayor, Pablo Henry Crick, the town has outlawed reading and forced most of the town's mothers to work as indentured laborers at the Big Tex Fish Cannery, which poisons the atmosphere and lines Crick's pockets.
Scraping by in this godforsaken landscape are best friends Prosperina and Neftalí—the latter of whom, one of the town's last literate citizens, hides and reads the books of the mysterious renegade author Jazzmin Monelle Rivas, whose last novel, Brother Brontë, is finally in Neftalí's possession. But after a series of increasingly violent atrocities committed by Crick's forces, Neftalí and Prosperina, with the help of a wounded bengal tigress, three scheming triplets, and an underground network of rebel tías, rise up to reclaim their city—and in the process, unlock Rivas's connection to Three Rivers itself.
An adventure that only the acclaimed Fernando A. Flores could dream up, Brother Brontë is a mordant, gonzo romp through a ruined world that, in its dysfunction, tyranny, and disparity, nonetheless feels uncannily like our own. With his most ambitious book yet, Flores once again bends what fiction can do, in the process crafting a moving and unforgettable story of perseverance.

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    • Kirkus

      Starred review from December 15, 2024
      A grim dystopia, Texas-style. The town of Three Rivers, Texas, has seen better days. "The streets and walls of the derelict buildings seemed chewed by the rats of time and stank like their own brand of rotting cheese," Flores writes, with characters stepping over "empty tin cans, squashed cigarette butts, used condoms, half-burned Bibles, and placentas of partly digested food." The year is 2038, and Three Rivers is being run by a corrupt mayor, Pablo Henry Crick, who distributes book shredders to local youths to enforce the city's book ban. One of Crick's many haters is Neftal�, who is losing her family home; she spends time with her former bandmate, Proserpina, wandering around the ruins of the city and the grounds of the town's main employer, the Big Tex Fish Cannery, where most mothers are required by law to work. Neftal�, Proserpina, and their friend Alexei are determined to change the town; as Alexei says, "We're gonna take over one street, one neighborhood, one city at a time, until they're forced to hand usour own part of the state, our own country." Meanwhile, Neftal� holds tight to her copy of a book by her favorite author, Jazzmin Monelle Rivas, who, it is later revealed, has her own connection to Three Rivers. Flores takes the novel in unexpected directions, introducing a mysterious group of triplets and a Bengal tiger named Mama. His prose is evocative, electric, and wildly original; he describes one character as "a heavy-metal D'Artagnan or a central Texan Kaspar Hauser, surviving on energy drinks and power chords alone." This is a wild ride of a novel, and a fascinating look at a future that, sadly, seems frighteningly plausible. A stunning tale of survival and a biting critique of book bans and late capitalism.

      COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Booklist

      Starred review from February 1, 2025
      Flores (Tears of the Truffle Pig, 2019) presents a mind-bending novel set in a near, not unimaginable future in which oddly charming Latinx characters inhabit and pass through the viscerally repulsive border town of Three Rivers, Texas, surrounded by decay, debris, and desperation. Reading and books are illegal there, and worker-mothers must slave away at the fish factory. Narrated from an omniscient point of view enlivened by Spanish, the novel is divided into three sections. The first and third follow best friends Neftal� and Proserpina, while the second is an interlude featuring Jazzmin Monelle Rivas, the author of Brother Bront�, a book that keeps popping up, even in a tiny origami-like "halceamadon" that Neftal� reads surreptitiously once her book collection and her home have been ravaged by the chupacabras book-shredder. While invoking the Bront�s, Flores' surreal tale wanders in a Rabelaisian manner. Subplots abound, including Neftal� and Proserpina's former bandmate Alexei's scheme to make Teddies (bottle tops embossed with the likeness of Teddy Roosevelt) the new currency; an assassination attempt on the mayor; a visit to a town where resources are shared and disputes settled democratically, which presents an appealing alternative to the privatized city of Three Rivers; and the drama around a tiger named Mama. Flores takes readers on a wild ride!

      COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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  • English

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