Brother Brontë

A Novel

by Fernando A. Flores

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Pub Date Feb 11 2025 | Archive Date Mar 11 2025

Farrar, Straus and Giroux | MCD

General Fiction (Adult) | Multicultural Interest

Description

"Brother Brontë evokes Octavia Butler, William Gibson, and John Steinbeck; these are all my favorites, and with this book, Fernando A. Flores joins the list." —Robin Sloan, author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

"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.

A Note From the Publisher

Fernando A. Flores was born in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico, and grew up in South Texas. He is the author of the collections Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas and Valleyesque and the novel Tears of the Trufflepig, which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named a best book of 2019 by Tor.com. His fiction has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, Frieze, Porter House Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Advance Praise

★ "[Flores'] prose is evocative, electric, and wildly original . . . 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." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"This book is lasagna, Samuel Delany lasagna. This crazy cakey world-making of Fernando A. Flores is all of literature, wide, plaintive, melancholy and full of feminist fellow joyousness and ways. It is totally Brother Brontë, a cool poetic guy eye towards a future protected only by the strength of friendships, mainly female, innovation, and the power of lusty youth or truth, both I think. Hated this world ending, I want more." —Eileen Myles

"The trick with dystopia is to leave room for light, and lightness; in our real world, tragedy and comedy are braided together. Fernando A. Flores gets this: his imagination ranges from the grimmest realities, of blood and fire and life made small, all the way through to breathtaking hope, and surprise, and solidarity. Brother Brontë evokes Octavia Butler, William Gibson, and John Steinbeck; these are all my favorites, and with this book, Fernando A. Flores joins the list." —Robin Sloan, author of Moonbound

"We fans of Fernando Flores’s work have long admired his virtuoso word play, his wizardly conjuring of images, and the power of his Texas borderlands vision and voice. Brother Brontë is his wildest and bravest work yet.” —Héctor Tobar, author of Our Migrant Souls

"In rich, exciting prose, Flores takes the reader on a wild and frightening adventure, roving narrative territories left completely unexplored by other recent U.S. writing, territories bordered in the far distance by the fantastic realms of Latin American and Eastern European greats. Sardonic, disturbing, and thoroughly pleasurable, Brother Brontë feels like nothing so much as a profoundly generous gift." —Jennifer Croft, author of The Extinction of Irena Rey

"With nods to Fahrenheit 451 and The Grapes of Wrath, Flores’s Brother Brontë carves out a space for itself in the landscape of post-collapse literature—and one which it fills with as much human warmth and vibrant poetry as it does righteous anger and dystopian sadness. A visceral journey through a uniquely American future, and an essential read." —Tim Maughan, author of Infinite Detail

"Deliciously odd, funny and affecting, Brother Brontë delights at every turn—of which there are a glorious many. A puzzle where each piece not only helps complete the picture but expands its margins, I cherished every character, every story, and (again) fell in love with Fernando A. Flores’s profound empathy and wild imagination. Brother Brontë is a gorgeously bonkers joyride." —Gerardo Sámano Córdova, author of Monstrilio