“I am sure that there is no piece of journalism that honors the voices of the migrants as much as this novel does. A writing that confronts. Poetry in the carrion.”

“This is a book of unbearable beauty and affliction. It is written with the lucidity of someone who has opened his eyes and refused to shut them again. The book’s power is not only in what it says, but in the silences that it leaves the reader’s conscience to grapple with.”

“Reading Emiliano Monge is tuning in to a secret poetry. This novel is the paradigm of a new narrative—cathartic, direct, vital, without beating around the bush.”

“A painful and fatal chant, Las tierras arrasadas magnificently sheds light on the thousands of nameless immigrants cast on the roads. Chilling and brutal, [the book] is a compendium of humanity in search for a better life.”

“Monge followed the track of the kidnapped, tortured and assassinated migrants, with enough compassion as to allow them to talk, or rather moan, without refusing the other truth, the one that sets the novelist apart from the journalist. Assuming that Evil is human, the author narrates not so much the back-and-forths of the victims, dead or alive, whose souls have been torn away, but of the kidnappers, traffickers of human beings, a man and woman willing to suffer through a tragic love story while they kill. In the sea of books I have read about the hell endured by migrants, about the fierce Mexico that they cross amidst of the narco wars, I suspect that Las tierras arrasadas is one that will survive.”

“In an odyssey of relentless human cruelty, Emiliano Monge, one of the many linguistically adroit writers currently at work in what is an exciting era for Mexican fiction, spares no one. That he can succeed in generating any sympathy for his frenetic lovers is entirely due to the ferocious eloquence of his prose, which has been magnificently well served by translator Frank Wynne’s Miltonic register. Filtered through a wry, if urgent, continuous present tense, it conveys the inhumanity of the jungle and desert landscapes … Monge’s realist, deadly topical fiction is a weighty metaphor for our world gone mad. His characters, however depraved, often reveal traces of empathy, self-doubt, even suppressed horror.”

“From the very first pages of Among the Lost, we’re engaged, and compromised … It’s a heady reading experience … Richly poetic … Monge is one of the most talented and interesting young novelists writing from today’s Mexico.”

“With its propulsive, lyrical, and often savage present-tense narrative, Among the Lost achieves a … relentless pitch … In Monge’s hell, the suffering is of Dantean cruelty.”

“The triumph of Among the Lost is its depiction of human suffering. In an innovative technique that again bears vague resemblance to Joyce, Monge intersperses his narrative with direct emotive accounts from migrants and asylum-seekers. Some of these passages are difficult to read. They are loaded with pathos and sentiment and are important emblems of truths amid the violence and moral corruption throughout novel: ‘This was where they first used their weapons… those who were still standing crumpled… pushing, scrabbling and jostling… desperate to be at the bottom of the heap… No one wanted to be left on top.’ Monge exposes these truths in stories that are not easy to shirk away from, with remarkable linguistic skill. An important read.”

“The novel’s tone is unsparing and grim, but Monge’s prose also includes many moments of beauty. The characters travel through a landscape that is harsh and unwelcoming but majestically rendered. Even as Estela and Epitafio, accompanied by assorted other traffickers and corrupt officials, wreak havoc and destroy lives, their inner worlds are sharply, convincingly drawn. Their personal dramas are entertaining, and their rage-filled bumbling provides occasional much-needed dark humor, at the same time as their enterprise evokes horror and disgust ... Among the Lost is a timely novel of immigration that is as beautiful as it is horrific. It is a multilayered, emotionally complex artistic triumph.”

“The relentless pace and vivid language, dynamically translated into English by Wynne, and including phrases from Dante and quotes from actual migrants, brings home the physical and emotional anxiety of those who have risked everything in the faint hope of a better life across the border ... In a remarkable literary feat, this tale of the dire events of one day illuminates the past, the present, and the future. While many questions remain unanswered at the end, this is a comprehensive drama of the human potential for violence and dreams in a fractured land.”

“It’s a brilliantly composed, dramatic and unflinching evocation of a world riven by endemic violence and extreme feeling, and an astute (if apocalyptic) road trip into the psychology of abuse.”

“Emiliano Monge’s concussive new novel is a love story. It’s also a blood-drenched journey through a world where kindness has been obliterated and almost every moral code shredded … its emotional ferocity is astonishing.You feel appalled, compromised, profoundly moved. You wish the US President would read it. Or read, full stop.”

“A dark vision of life on the border between the inferno and an imagined paradise, this book paints an all too real picture of what people will do for a new life.”

“The language in Among the Lost is both striking and strikingly easy to read … He channels the full spectrum of written expression, and the result hits the trifecta: beautiful, fast-paced, and completely his own.”