We, the broken, recognize each other easily. We attract and repel with the same image, forming a sad and defeated bond. We are the town built next to the volcano, the city that rose on shaky ground. All our days, the days of the great earthquake. Our village will collapse, and from one moment to the next, it will disappear from the face of the earth. A young girl finds a collection of photographs belonging to her younger brother, Julián. She doesn't understand why Julián decided to keep these photos, which don't frame particularly happy moments; on the contrary, most of them seem like precursors to a domestic catastrophe. Thinking about it carefully, this is his childhood in Veracruz, precursors and consequences of an ongoing catastrophe, the precise composition of her, her brother, and her mother in the form of wreckage. Her father is a violent and unpredictable man who hurts them in the most arbitrary and provocative ways. Despite this, he has always had the worst fate, which at a certain point pushes him to take refuge behind a wall of silence, but silence is capable of contaminating him with its own version of violence. This novel is a reconstruction of the photo album, a puzzle that represents a complete memory. The older sister knows she cannot rely on these photos to tell a happy story, so will she at least be able to tell a plausible one? And who is the most absent from this story: Julian or herself? Will she be able to escape the sinking in time? In exemplary prose, both moving and precise, *Among the Broken* reminds us that we are our own memories, a kaleidoscope that displays images that are more broken than colorful. “I read the book like a jigsaw puzzle. I tried to put them together in my head, but they kept moving inside my mind. I couldn’t get them down, and that’s what I loved about them.” - Mexican writer and poet Isabel Zapata “The book offers us a process of recovering what is broken, a subjectivity shattered by experience, but it extends to an awareness of the characteristics of human value and literature in and of itself.” - Mexican writer Jorge Comenzal “Alayde’s book explores the always painful subjective violence and the ruptures it causes in society, in families, in relationships, and within ourselves.” - Mexican website "Melino"