Hombrecito: A Novel

by Santiago Jose Sanchez

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

We're not the only fans of this story about the search for home, family, belonging and identity — Brandon Taylor (The Late Americans) and Xochitl Gonzalez (Anita de Monte Laughs Last) are too.

FINALIST FOR THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY YOUNG LIONS FICTION AWARD

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND KIRKUS REVIEWS

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593542187
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/25/2024
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Santiago Jose Sanchez (they/them) is a queer Colombian American writer and artist born in Ibagué, Colombia. Their stories have been featured in McSweeney’s Quarterly, ZYZZYVA, Subtropics, and Joyland. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Yale University, Sanchez teaches at Grinnell College and lives in Iowa, Miami, and New York City. Hombrecito is their debut novel.

Editorial Reviews

★ 04/29/2024

Sanchez debuts with a dazzling chronicle of a queer immigrant’s coming of age in Colombia and Miami. In late 1990s Ibague, Santiago and his older half brother, Manuel, are raised by his single mother, a doctor who often neglects to pick Santiago up from school (“Today she forgot to be a mother,” he narrates on one such occasion). After the family moves to Miami when Santiago is six, his mother struggles to find work. Manuel resents being dragged away from Colombia and begins to rebel, while Santiago comes to realize he is gay and develops an active sex life by the time he’s a teen. In his early 20s, after moving to Brooklyn and finding work as a waiter, Santiago joins his mother on a trip back to Colombia. There, he looks up his taciturn father, an erstwhile civil engineer who now drives a cab, and reconciles with the disconnection he feels from his birthplace. Santiago’s sad and dreamy perspective immerses readers into his search for a sense of home, and the many raw and sensual sex scenes speak to his hunger for connection. This is a triumph. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Hombrecito:

“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 is a terrific new literary voice. Their debut novel sizzles. . . Sanchez is an author to watch.”
—NPR

"Exquisite and emotionally charged."
—Oprah Daily
 
“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

“Hombrecito soars. A gorgeous, intense, and moving portrait of queerness, migration, desire, and abiding love. Sanchez has made something beautiful.”
—Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of All This Could Be Different

"Hombrecito is a charged and charmed tapestry; drawn from a painstaking and meticulous eye-witness account of a young immigrant, navigating the perilous fault lines of place within family and his awaking sexuality. Your heart will be first shattered then expanded forever."
—Brontëz Purnell, author of 100 Boyfriends

“[A] soulful debut.”
—Michelle Hart, Electric Lit
 
“It’s as an electrifying book with sentences that will leave you speechless.”
—Debutiful

From the Publisher

André Santana narrates this queer coming-of-age story with tenderness that will touch listeners' hearts. The story begins with 6-year-old Santiago's arrival in the U.S. from Colombia with his mother and half-brother. As they settle in place, his mother, who is always working, often leaves Santiago to his own devices. As Santiago matures, he discovers and embraces his queer identity while he grapples with intense emotions. As an adult, he reflects on his relationships with his mother and his absent father, as well as his relationships with boyfriends. Santana's smooth voice elegantly conveys Santiago's quiet turmoil. Santana ably portrays the other characters with slight changes in timbre, narrating in Spanish when necessary. His narration helps listeners appreciate this deep contemplation of family, immigration, and queer identity. A.M. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2024 - AudioFile

★ 2024-04-20
A boy moves with his family from Colombia to the U.S., only to embark on his own journey of self-discovery.

This intense and tender debut novel follows the plight of a young boy, Santiago, as he navigates childhood and young adulthood across two continents, from Colombia to Miami to New York and back again. In Ibagué, Santiago’s father departs for extended stretches, ostensibly working in Tierra Caliente, Mexico. The boy’s mother also disappears, though her whereabouts are less certain, leaving Santiago and his older brother, Manuel, to cope and fend for themselves: “We, the boys, will bathe in the rivers....We will be revolutionaries.” In the novel’s opening section, Sanchez employs the definitive article to impose a jarring distance between “the mother,” “the father,” “the brother,” and “the boy” before pivoting to a more conventional first-person perspective. Eventually, the brothers move with their mother to Miami, and then Santiago strikes out on his own for New York, where he can fully explore his burgeoning queer identity. Part family saga, part coming-of-age story, the novel reckons with issues of abandonment, migration, and gay identity, as Santiago confronts the ripple effects of trauma and separation on his family. When Santiago returns to Colombia to visit, Sanchez pivots point of view again to focus on the mother. Throughout, the author’s close attention to tiny details yields a finely rendered material and emotional landscape, whether it’s a discarded plastic sofa cover, a dress removed by the mother for inspection (like “the hide of an animal, symmetrically filleted”), or postcoital perspiration from one of Santiago’s older partners: “three lines of sweat running down his pecs.” In its depiction of brotherly bonds, Latin American men, and gay sexuality, the novel is comparable to We the Animals by Justin Torres and marks the emergence of an exciting new voice in American fiction.

Heart-wrenching in its realism, this novel captures the recklessness of young lust and the enduring pain of familial love.

Kirkus Reviews