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Death Takes Me
- Author
- Cristina Rivera Garza
- Narrator
- various
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Publishing
- Publish Date
- 25 February 2025
- Run Time
- 8 hours 9 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
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What to expect
Translated by Sarah Booker and Robin Myers
A city is always a cemetery.
When a professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a man in a dark alley, she finds a stark warning on the brick wall beside the body, scrawled in coral nail polish: ‘Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.’
After reporting the crime to the police, the professor becomes the lead informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. But what has the professor really seen? While more bodies of men are found across the city, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems, and the darker stream of violence spreading throughout the city.
From one of Mexico’s greatest living writers, Death Takes Me is a dark and dazzling literary thriller that flips the traditional crime narrative on its head, in a world where death is rampant and violence is gendered. Unfolding with the charged logic of a dream in sentences as sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the victims – a word which, in Spanish, is always feminine – it explores with masterful imagination the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.
PRAISE FOR CRISTINA RIVERA GARZA
'Warning: Cristina Rivera Garza is an explosive writer. A dexterous creator of atmospheres, with a powerful style, an evocative and indomitable language' Lina Meruane
'A masterful storyteller' Jennifer Clement
Critics Review
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This detective novel radically scrambles what we think of, and how we relate to, the genre ... The case [is] “full of psychological nooks and crannies. Of poetic shadows. Gender traps. Metaphors. Metonyms.” That also describes Rivera Garza’s exceptional style, and the deeply rewarding experience of reading Death Takes Me. The novel is dense and elliptical, a dreamscape with a powerful undertow ... [A] harrowing and labyrinthine masterpiece
New York Times
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A subversive twist on the traditional serial killer story
Time
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Rivera Garza, who won a Pulitzer prize last year for her memoir of femicide in Mexico, plays with form, blending fiction with an essay complete with footnotes, satirising media coverage, incorporating comments on the publication of the book we’re reading, and generally having fun. Her exuberance is contagious. “Reading shouldn’t be so complicated,” says one character. “A matter of turning the page.” Of course, it’s both
Spectator
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When is a novel not a novel, and when is a novel more than a novel? Death Takes Me, the new novel by Cristina Rivera Garza, juggles these ideas and doesn't let them drop in a story that is part crime fiction, part poetry, part thesis and so many things besides ... All those genres and ways of thinking can be found in this book
Ian McMillan on 'The Verb'
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Rivera Garza’s dazzling prose here becomes sharper than ever … Obsessive, dreamlike and hallucinatory, Death Takes Me lingers inside your brain long after you’ve read it
Layla Martínez
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An extraordinary, fiercely imaginative novel, written with the precision of a true master of her craft … I couldn’t put it down
Juan Gómez-Jurado
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The novel brilliantly melds the grit and pacing of a police procedural with literary theory ... It’s all seamlessly conveyed in Rivera Garza’s incisive and poetic style. Life and literature become one in this singular achievement
Publishers Weekly
User Reviews
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Details
- Author
- Cristina Rivera Garza
- Narrator
- various
- Duration
- 8 hours 9 minutes
- Release Date
- 25 February 2025
- ISBN
- 9781526649416
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Publishing
- Genre
- Fiction: literary and general non-genre, Crime and / or mystery fiction, Modern and contemporary fiction: literary and general, Thriller / suspense fiction
Synopsis
Bloomsbury presents Death Takes Me by Cristina Rivera Garza, read by Tony Chiroldes, Lee Osorio, Ines del Castillo, Fabiola Stevenson, Carlotta Brentan, Mark Sanderlin, and Victoria Villarreal.Translated by Sarah Booker and Robin MyersA city is always a cemetery.When a professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a man in a dark alley, she finds a stark warning on the brick wall beside the body, scrawled in coral nail polish: ‘Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.’After reporting the crime to the police, the professor becomes the lead informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. But what has the professor really seen? While more bodies of men are found across the city, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems, and the darker stream of violence spreading throughout the city.From one of Mexico’s greatest living writers, Death Takes Me is a dark and dazzling literary thriller that flips the traditional crime narrative on its head, in a world where death is rampant and violence is gendered. Unfolding with the charged logic of a dream in sentences as sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the victims – a word which, in Spanish, is always feminine – it explores with masterful imagination the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.PRAISE FOR CRISTINA RIVERA GARZA'Warning: Cristina Rivera Garza is an explosive writer. A dexterous creator of atmospheres, with a powerful style, an evocative and indomitable language' Lina Meruane'A masterful storyteller' Jennifer Clement
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