Seventeen Cigarettes: A Catalog of Broken Things is a luminous, intimate collection of short pieces that track a life by its small collapses — the hum of a refrigerator, a voicemail left unheard, a stubborn blinking clock, the pallor of morning light. Ronju Ahmed writes in a steady, observant prose that makes the ordinary feel like a landscape of remembered loss and strange tenderness.
These linked vignettes move through apartment halls, corner coffee shops, and the ten slow blocks home, following a narrator who counts steps and cigarettes the way other people keep time by calendars. Each fragment is both a story and a map — of memory that knots instead of following a line, of what we leave behind, and what we carry like a secret weight. For readers of quiet literary fiction and contemporary short-form storytelling, Seventeen Cigarettes is a small, sharp book that lingers.
