Brother Bronte

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 Neftali-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 Bronte, is finally in Neftali's possession. But after a series of increasingly violent atrocities committed by Crick's forces, Neftali and Prosperina, with the help of a wounded bengal tigress, three scheming triplets, and an underground network of rebel tias, 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 Bronte 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.