Brother Bront: A Novel [Hardcover]

Longlisted for the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

One ofKirkus'Best of Fiction 2025.Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by theLos Angeles Times,Town & Country,andAlta.

Floress style has an exhilarating punk, D.I.Y. aplomb; its as if he feels hes inventing literature for the first time. Mark Leyner,The New York Times Book Review

Floress 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 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 its 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 Proserpina and Neftal?. One of Three Rivers last literate citizens, Neftal? hides and reads the books of the mysterious renegade author Jazzmin Monelle Rivas, whose last novel,Brother Bront?, is finally in Neftal?s possession. But after a series of increasingly violent atrocities committed by Cricks forces, Neftal? and Proserpina, with the help of a wounded Bengal tigress, three scheming triplets, and an underground network of rebel t?as, 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 Bront?is a mordant, gonzo romp through a rl³$