santiago
jose sanchez
coming June 25, 2024
hombrecito
An electric, breathtaking novel about a young queer immigrant living between cultures, between different ideas of himself.
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 disappearing herself once they get to Miami.
In America, the boy embraces his queerness as wholeheartedly as he embraces his new home, but not without a sense of loss. 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.
As a young man, he ducks in and out of bed with different men seeking out something, someone, to make him whole again. When his mother invites him to visit family in Colombia with her, he returns, trying to find peace with his father, with his homeland, with who he’s become since he left, and with who his mother is: 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, with humor and heartbreak, a story for anyone searching for home, searching for a way to love.
About santiago
Santiago Jose Sanchez (they/them) is a queer Colombian American writer and artist. Their stories have been published in McSweeney's, ZYZZYVA, Subtropics, and Joyland. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Yale University, Sanchez now teaches fiction at Grinnell College. Hombrecito, their debut novel, is coming out from Riverhead in June 2024.
EARLY PRAISE
“Sanchez has spun the first-generation experience into a narrative unlike one I’ve read before. Full of longing, dislocation, and desire, Hombrecito 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
“Hombrecito soars. A gorgeous, intense, and moving portrait of queerness, migration, desire, and abiding love. Sanchez has made something beautiful.”
Sarah Thankam Matthews, author of All This Could Be Different
“Hombrecito is a gorgeous novel 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
"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. You heart will be first shattered then expanded forever."
Brontez Purnell, author of 100 Boyfriends
“Hombrecito 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. Sanchez is a stunning new talent.”
Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness
“Dynamic, electrifying, and oh so tender, Hombrecito is the rare kind of page-turner I devoured in two sittings.”
Xochitl Gonzalez, author of Olga Dies Dreaming
ConTACT
For press or media inquiries for Hombrecito, please reach out to Claire McGinnis at Riverhead Books.
For literary rights or other related matters, please contact Jin Auh at The Wylie Agency.