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Brother Brontë

9780374604165 fc
Hardcover, MCD × FSG, 2025
Flores  fernando by eric morales

Fernando A. Flores

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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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  • "[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 (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

  • "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

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