Among the broken – the hands are not enough for her.

We, the broken ones, easily recognize each other. We exchange and clash in the same image, forming a sad and defeated bond. We are the town built next to the volcano, the city standing on shaky ground. All our days are days of the great earthquake. Our village will collapse, and at any moment, it will disappear from the face of the earth. A young girl stumbles upon a collection of photos belonging to her younger brother, Julian. She doesn’t understand why Julian decided to keep those photos, which do not specifically frame happy moments, but rather, most of them seem like preludes to a household disaster. Thinking about it carefully, this is his childhood in Perakroth, preludes and consequences of an ongoing catastrophe, its precise formation, and her brother and mother in the image of wreckage. Their father is a violent and unpredictable man, hurting them in the most cruel and provocative ways. Despite that, the worst part of Julian’s fate has always been present, pushing him at a certain moment to seek refuge behind a wall of silence, but silence can taint him with its own version of violence. This novel is a reconstruction of a photo album that represents a puzzle and constitutes a complete memory. The older sister knows she cannot rely on those photos to tell a happy story, so can she at least tell a reasonable story? And who is the greater absent in this story, Julian or herself? Will she be able to survive drowning in time? In an ideal, impactful, and precise prose work, "Among the Broken" reminds us that we represent our own memory, and that it is a mosaic displaying broken rather than colorful images. “I read the book as if it were one of those picture puzzle pieces. I tried to assemble them in my mind, but they started moving inside my head, and I couldn’t grasp them, and that’s what I liked so much.” — Mexican writer and poet Isabel Sabata “The book offers us a process of restoring what is broken as a self that was shattered by experience, but it also extends to understanding the qualities of human value and literature itself.” — Mexican writer Jorge Comensal “The book by Alayidi explores the always painful domestic violence, and what it causes in tearing apart society, families, relationships, and within ourselves.” — Mexican website Milenio