NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • “A searing account of grief and the quest to bring her sister’s murderer to justice years after the fact” (The Boston Globe), from “one of Mexico’s greatest living writers” (Jonathan Lethem).
October 18th, 2019. Cristina Rivera Garza travels from her home in Texas to Mexico City, in search of an old, unresolved criminal file. “My name is Cristina Rivera Garza,” she writes in her request to the attorney general, “and I am writing to you as a relative of Liliana Rivera Garza, who was murdered on July 16, 1990.” It’s been twenty-nine years. Twenty-nine years, three months, and two days since Liliana was murdered by an abusive ex-boyfriend. Inspired by feminist movements across the world and enraged by the global epidemic of femicide and intimate partner violence, Liliana’s Invincible Summer is the account—and the outcome—of Cristina Rivera Garza’s extraordinary quest towards justice.
In luminous, poetic prose, Rivera Garza tells a singular yet universally resonant story of Liliana’s life; a spirited, wondrously hopeful young woman who tried to survive in a world of increasingly normalized gendered violence, depicting everything from her early romance with a handsome but possessive and short-tempered man, to that exhilarating final summer of 1990 when Liliana loved, thought, and traveled more widely and freely than she ever had before.
Using her skills as an acclaimed scholar, novelist, and poet, Rivera Garza collected and curated evidence—handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, interviews with Liliana’s loved ones—to document her sister’s life. Through this remarkable and genre-defying memoir, she confronts the trauma of losing her sister, and examines how this tragedy continues to shape who she is—and what she fights for—today.
