In the oppressive near-future landscape of Brother Bronte, Three Rivers, Texas stands as a grotesque monument to late-stage capitalism gone catastrophically wrong. Here, in the year 2038, Fernando A. Flores unveils his most ambitious vision yet—a world where literature is contraband, mothers are conscripted labor, and volcanic ash blots out the sun. Despite these bleak circumstances, the novel pulses with humanity through its masterful portrayal of friendship and resistance. Building on the surrealist tendencies and border town settings he explored in Tears of the Trufflepig and the short story collection Valleyesque, Flores has crafted a world both hauntingly familiar and disturbingly strange. What elevates this dystopian tale above genre conventions is Flores’s electric prose style—equal parts gritty realism and hallucinatory vision—and his unwavering commitment to characters marginalized by systems of power. The novel’s greatness lies in how it transforms familiar dystopian tropes into something fresh and vital through an inventive narrative structure, unforgettable characters, and a deep meditation on authorship and women’s voices. The Last Readers of Three Rivers The novel centers on Neftalí Barrientos, …