We Saw Houses Sink

With bold, boundary-breaking prose, We Watched Houses Sink is “a novel of initiation into dissidence—romantic, sexual, and familial—a reconstruction of how political and economic power weaves its web to entangle our future. A beautiful novel.” —Juan Pablo Villalobos

In the early 1990s, the construction of a hydroelectric dam in Zimapán, Querétaro, emerged as a symbol of modern progress—but it also came with the threat of submerging entire communities. Years later, I—who was just a child when the dam was built—returns to her childhood home after a devastating flood. As she helps her mother clean up, fragments of her past resurface: the stifling relationship with her surroundings, her rebellious youth, the need to forge her own identity, her romantic and sexual relationships, and, above all, her desire to shed the Irene she once was in order to become I—a version of herself unburdened by her family’s expectations.