MY FISTS

Bobby is sixteen years old, lives in a dangerous neighborhood, and has a raw talent for fighting that he discovers out of necessity rather than choice. When Raider, a former world champion hiding a violent, silent past, decides to train him, Bobby begins a two-year transformation that takes him from the underground basement where he earned fifty dollars a fight to the international professional circuit. Success comes fast, and with it, forgetting: of his people, of his mentor, of himself. A public humiliation at a national tournament — carried out, unbeknownst to Bobby until the very last second, by Raider himself under a mask — forces him to hit rock bottom before he can rebuild. Set in a Latin American neighborhood marked by poverty and everyday violence, My Fists combines the rawness of mixed martial arts with a central question: what separates a man capable of reaching the top from one capable of losing it all? For Raider and for Bobby, the answer was always the same: control over one's own strength. A novel of sports redemption rooted in family drama, with a mentor-student relationship carrying as much emotional weight as any of its fights.