"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 townand literaturein 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 towns mothers to work as indentured laborers at the Big Tex Fish Cannery, which poisons the atmosphere and lines Cricks pockets.
Scraping by in this godforsaken landscape are best friends Prosperina and Neftalíthe latter of whom, one of the towns last literate citizens, hides and reads the books of the mysterious renegade author Jazzmin Monelle Rivas, whose last novel, Brother Brontë, is finally in Neftalís possession. But after a series of increasingly violent atrocities committed by Cricks 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 cityand in the process, unlock Rivass 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.
