Brother Brontë: A Novel [9781250419927]

Overview

Longlisted for the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

One of Kirkus' Best of Fiction 2025. 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 its 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 Proserpina and Neftalí. One of Three Rivers’ last literate citizens, Neftalí 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 Proserpina, 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, 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.