Description

Three brothers tear their way through childhood – smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from rubbish, hiding when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn – he’s Puerto Rican, she’s white. Barely out of childhood themselves, their love is a serious, dangerous thing. Life in this family is fierce and absorbing, full of chaos and heartbreak and the euphoria of belonging completely to one another. From the intense familial unity felt by a child to the profound alienation he endures as he begins to forge his own way in the world, this beautiful novel reinvents the coming-of-age story in a way that is sly and incredibly powerful.

Publisher Review

A heart-rending coming of age novel - intense, poised and pummelling. Almost pitch-perfect in its nerve-exposed vulnerability -- Helen Davies * Sunday Times * Torres's lyrical treatment of transgression can be shocking... [At] times his prose has the intensity of poetry -- Peter Carty * Independent * A strobe light of a story, its flash set on slow, producing before our eyes lurid and poetic snapshots... I want more of Torres's haunting, word-torn world * New York Times Book Review * It's rare to come across a young writer with a voice whose uniqueness, power and resonance are evident from the very first page, or even the very first paragraph... A slender, tightly wound debut novel by a remarkable young talent... Torres should excite us the way that Raymond Carver or Jeffrey Eugenides did * Washington Post * A searing and sparkling piece of writing that promises great things to come * Esquire * An exciting and unique narrative voice... his powerful, lyrical prose gives even the darkest of scenes a sheen of brilliance * Stylist * Delicious pacing [with a] dark sparkle... It takes you to a place you wouldn't think of going to voluntarily, but you'll be glad for the ride * Gay Times * Oscillating between violence and affection, pathos and humour, the story is enriched by Torres's fresh and ornate prose -- Alex Preston * Observer * The 19 short chapters are each like a round in a boxing match - intense, poised and pummelling -- Helen Davies * Sunday Times * A slender but affecting debut novel... We the Animals is the kind of sensitive, carefully wrought autobiographical first novel that may soon be extinct from the mainstream publishing world * New York Times * A heart-rending fiction debut, about an American boy who grows up and apart from his close-knit family * Sunday Times * Very effectively evokes the physicality of living together at close quarters through tears, laughter and terrible betrayal -- Alastair Mabbott * Herald * Extraordinary... offers powerful imagery and sentences that pierce straight through the skin * Dundee University Review of the Arts *