Brother Brontë

Brother Brontë is a dystopian novel that plays with the Brontë legacy in a curious way:

Brother Brontë

A Novel

Fernando A. Flores

MCD Books

ISBN: 9780374604165

February 2025

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 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.

In the novel the author weaves a metafictional narrative that reimagines the Brontë legacy through the lens of literary conspiracy. Central to the story is a book within the book, Brother Brontë, written by Jazzmin Monelle Rivas, which challenges traditional accounts of authorship by suggesting that Branwell Brontë, rather than his sisters, was the true genius behind Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
This idea is explored through the setting of Our Brother Branwell Academy for Girls, a mysterious boarding school where students slowly uncover the supposed truth about Branwell’s role in literature. Twin protagonists, symbolically named Pride and Prejudice, navigate this institution, questioning literary history and encountering figures who debate the authenticity of the Brontë sisters' authorship. One character, Gia, even doubts their existence altogether, while another, Neftalí, acknowledges them as real but explains how the novel within the novel reshapes their legacy to place Branwell at the center.