Brother Brontë

De: Fernando A. Flores

Narrado por: Victoria Villarreal

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by the Los Angeles Times

"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.

©2025 Fernando A. Flores (P)2025 Recorded Books

What could happen after a disaster and a bad government...

It's a peak into a future world in which reaction to a natural disaster leads to anarchy, privatizing gone too far and chaos. The story is from the eyes of a few in a small town in south Texas and how they live their lives in the aftermath. Good storytelling and thought provoking.

Perseverance

Dystopian? No. Speculative? Yeah. The story, like the best if it’s kind in my estimation Oryx & Crake by Atwood, builds a world one can easily touch, can recognize. It draws you in. (Am also craving a Tamale now.)

Exuberant, florid, fun

Utterly unique, "Brother Brontë" is a many things at once: a story about women and girls navigating a landscape ruined by small men; a story about the prophetic power of literature; a warning. As much as the author seems motivated to weave a hallucinatory tapestry worthy of Terry Gilliam, the fictional Texas town evoked here feels awfully close to home. Squint and we're nearly there.

All that said, "Brother Brontë," above all, is a beautiful read. The prose is almost reckless, packed with florid similes and unexpected evocations of color, light, and sound - rain falling like "slabs of ham" will always stand out. For all the dystopian plot elements on display, it's an exuberant, extremely fun novel, moving, sweet and rewarding to finish. Highly recommended.

Detailed wrong things

I was interested in the theme of the book because it mirrored the direction of current events. However, the details about the important parts of the book were sketchy but trivial things were overly detailed. The narrator mispronounced several things which I find annoying because it is just lazy . For instance Bexar county is pronounced bear not bex ar. And the author lives in texas but claims George West is in the hill country but it is not even close. Also I’m not sure what the tiger had to do with anything and why it was so important to the protagonist. If it was some metaphor, it went right over my head.

full of itself

I recommend skipping book one, reading book two first, then going back to one, then book three. this book is not super coherent but takes its very seriously. when i say this book is full of itself, the last line of the book is literally a line about how important and meaningful and sacred the last lines of books are. it thinks very highly of itself