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.

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.

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE In this groundbreaking debut, 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. " 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 miracle in concentrated pages, you are going to read it again and again." --Dorothy Allison "Rumbles with lyric dynamite . . . Torres is a savage new talent." --Benjamin Percy, Esquire "A fiery ode to boyhood . . . A welterweight champ of a book." --NPR, Weekend Edition "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." -- Washington Post "A novel so honest, poetic, and tough that it makes you reexamine what it means to love and to hurt." -- O, The Oprah Magazine "The communal howl of three young brothers sustains this sprint of a novel . . . A kind of incantation." -- The New Yorker

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE In this groundbreaking debut, 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. " 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 miracle in concentrated pages, you are going to read it again and again." --Dorothy Allison "Rumbles with lyric dynamite . . . Torres is a savage new talent." --Benjamin Percy, Esquire "A fiery ode to boyhood . . . A welterweight champ of a book." --NPR, Weekend Edition "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." -- Washington Post "A novel so honest, poetic, and tough that it makes you reexamine what it means to love and to hurt." -- O, The Oprah Magazine "The communal howl of three young brothers sustains this sprint of a novel . . . A kind of incantation." -- The New Yorker