We the Animals

By Justin Torres

Tags: Gay, POC and Queer, Literary Fiction, NYT Top 100

The critically acclaimed debut from the National Book Award-winning author of Blackouts.

In this award-winning, groundbreaking novel, Justin Torres plunges us into the chaotic heart of one family, the intense bonds of three brothers, and the mythic effects of this fierce love on the people we must become.

“A tremendously gifted writer whose highly personal voice should excite us in much the same way that Raymond Carver’s or Jeffrey Eugenides’s voice did when we first heard it."—The Washington Post

Three brothers tear their way through childhood— smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out 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—and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmakes a family many times. 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 see the world, this beautiful novel reinvents the coming-of-age story in a way that is sly and punch-in-the-stomach powerful.

"We the Animals is a dark jewel of a book. It’s heartbreaking. It’s beautiful. It resembles no other book I’ve read.”—Michael Cunningham

"A fiery ode to boyhood . . . A welterweight champ of a book."—NPR, Weekend Edition

"We the Animals snatches the reader by the scruff of the heart, tight as teeth, and shakes back and forth--between the human and the animal, the housed and the feral, love and violence, mercy and wrath--and leaves him in the wilderness, ravished by its beauty. It is an indelible and essential work of art." —Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tinkers

"We the Animals marks the debut of an astonishing new voice in American Literature. In an intense coming-of-age story that brings to mind the early work of Jeffrey Eugenides and Sandra Cisneros, Torres's concentrated prose goes down hot like strong liquor. His beautifully flawed characters worked their way into my heart on the very first page and have been there ever since." —Tayari Jones, author of Silver Sparrow

"We the Animals is a gorgeous, deeply humane book. Every page sings, and every scene startles. I think we'll all be reading Justin Torres for years to come." —Daniel Alarcon, author of Lost City Radio and War by Candlelight

"A strobe light of a story...I wanted more of Torres's haunting word-torn world..." —New York Times Book Review

"Justin Torres' debut novel is a welterweight champ of a book. It's short but it's also taut, elegant, lean -- and it delivers a knockout." —NPR's Weekend Edition