We The Animals

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.

JUSTIN TORRES was born in 1980 and grew up in upstate New York. His work has appeared in Granta, Tin House, and Glimmer Train. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a recipient of the Rolon United States Artist Fellowship in Literature, and is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.