The Broken Circle

An emotional and sweeping memoir of love and survival—and of a committed and desperate family uprooted and divided by the violent, changing landscape of Afghanistan in the early 1980s.

Before the Soviet invasion of 1980, Enjeela Ahmadi remembers her home—Kabul, Afghanistan—as peaceful, prosperous, and filled with people from all walks of life. But after her mother, unsettled by growing political unrest, leaves for medical treatment in India, the civil war intensifies, changing young Enjeela’s life forever. Amid the rumble of invading Soviet tanks, Enjeela and her family are thrust into chaos and fear when it becomes clear that her mother will not be coming home.

Thus begins an epic, reckless, and terrifying five-year journey of escape for Enjeela, her siblings, and their father to reconnect with her mother. In navigating the dangers ahead of them, and in looking back at the wilderness of her homeland, Enjeela discovers the spiritual and physical strength to find hope in the most desperate of circumstances.

A heart-stopping memoir of a girl shaken by the brutalities of war and empowered by the will to survive, The Broken Circle brilliantly illustrates that family is not defined by the borders of a country but by the bonds of the heart.

Enjeela Ahmadi-Miller was born in 1975 in Kabul, Afghanistan, and is now a citizen of the United States. She also lived in Pakistan and India and speaks several languages, including Farsi, English, Hindi, and Urdu.

An entrepreneur since the age of eighteen, she has owned several businesses: a restaurant (Angelo’s Pizza in Los Angeles); a cosmetics line (Ahmadi, sold in spas and salons in LA); retail stores (Bella Bella, Friction, and Milan, all in Dallas); and a clothing line (Henry III Generation, sold in Neiman Marcus and boutiques throughout the US). In 2004 she married prominent Dallas real estate guru Henry S. Miller III, and in 2005 their son, Alexander, was born. A dynamic mother who strives to be as open and giving as possible, she maintains a creative, passionate, artistic, and spiritual outlook on life.