Hombrecito

A novel by a brilliant new voice, Hombrecito is a queer coming-of-age story about a young immigrant’s complex relationships with his mother and his motherland

In this groundbreaking novel, Santiago Jose Sanchez plunges us into the heart of one boy’s life. His mother takes him and his brother from Colombia to America, leaving their absent father behind but essentially disappearing herself once they get to Miami.

In America, his mother works as a waitress when she was once a doctor. The boy embraces his queer identity as wholeheartedly as he embraces his new home, but not without a sense of loss. As he grows, his relationship with his mother becomes fraught, tangled, a love so intense that it borders on vivid pain but is also the axis around which his every decision revolves. She may have once forgotten him, disappeared, but she is always on his mind.

He moves to New York, ducking in and out of bed with different men as he seeks out something, someone, to make him whole again. When his mother invites him to visit family in Colombia with her, he returns to the country as a young man, trying to find peace with his father, with his homeland, with who he’s become since he left, and with who his mother is: finally we come to know her and her secrets, her complex ambivalence and fierce love.

Hombrecito—“little man”—is a moving portrait of a young person between cultures, between different ideas of himself. From an extraordinary new talent, this is a story told with startling beauty and intensity, a story for anyone searching for home, searching for a way to love.

“Sanchez’s powerful first novel follows a young boy from Colombia to the United States and back again as he struggles with abandonment issues, acclimating to a new homeland and grappling with his own queer sexual awakening.”
—Washington Post
 
“Santiago Jose Sanchez had already made a mark on the literary world before their book hit the shelves, but once Hombrecito reaches a wider audience, it will never be forgotten… it’s easy to find oneself in the pages of Hombrecito thanks to Sanchez’s brilliant writing.”
—Screenrant

“A beautiful coming-of-age novel about the fractured bond between a young queer man and his mother…a remarkably honest portrait of self-discovery that is full of tenderness and desire and grief — all the things that make us human.”
—Vulture

“A dazzling chronicle of a queer immigrant’s coming of age in Colombia and Miami… This is a triumph.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred)

“Intense and tender…Part family saga, part coming-of-age story, the novel reckons with issues of abandonment, migration, and gay identity … marks the emergence of an exciting new voice in American fiction.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“Sanchez has spun the first-generation experience into a narrative unlike one I’ve read before. Full of longing, dislocation, and desire, they capture perfectly the no soy de aquí y no soy de allá existence of immigrants and of queerness more broadly. A beautiful debut.”
—Alejandro Varela, author of The Town of Babylon

“Dynamic, electrifying, and oh so tender, Hombrecito is the rare kind of page-turner I devoured in two sittings. Utterly American and Colombian, this is a magnificent story for anyone on a mission to redefine home, loss, and love in all its complicated forms and sources.”
—Xochitl Gonzalez, author of Olga Dies Dreaming

“Hombrecito is a gorgeous novel of the in-between, the waiting lull, and the changing mind, that shows Santiago Jose Sanchez to be a brilliant poet of silence, desire, light, and shadow. These sentences left me speechless.”
—Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life

“Captures with rare vividness the rapture and terror of childhood, the way self-making and self-destruction can grow so tangled as to be indistinguishable. This is a novel of enormous insight, musicality, and love. Sanchez is a stunning new talent.”
—Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness