Liliana’s Invincible Summer

Author Cristina Rivera Garza
Narrator Victoria Villarreal
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
Run Time 8 hours and 33 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Biography and non-fiction prose, History, Society and Social Sciences, True crime, Violence and abuse in society, Violence, intolerance and persecution in history.

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What to expect

A 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
A NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, TIME AND NEW YORKER BOOK OF THE YEAR

‘Meticulously written and deeply moving . . . A triumph’ JACKIE KAY
‘Absorbing and poetic’ ECONOMIST
‘Full of tenderness and beauty’ MARIANA ENRIQUEZ

From one of Mexico’s greatest contemporary writers, an astonishing work of non-fiction that illuminates an epidemic of femicide in Mexico through the death of one woman.

I seek justice, I finally said. I seek justice for my sister . . . Sometimes it takes twenty-nine years to say it out loud, to say it out loud on a phone call with a lawyer at the General Attorney’s office: I seek justice.

On the dawn of 16 July 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza, Cristina Rivera Garza’s sister, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend and subsumed into Mexico's dark and relentless history of femicide.

She was a twenty-year-old architecture student who had been trying for years to end her relationship with a high school boyfriend who insisted on not letting her go. A few weeks before the tragedy, Liliana made a definitive decision: at the height of her winter she had discovered that, as Albert Camus had said, there was an invincible summer in her. She would leave him behind. She would start a new life. She would do a master's degree and a doctorate; she would travel to London. But his decision was that she would not have a life without him.

Returning to Mexico after decades of living in the United States, Cristina Rivera Garza collects and curates evidence – handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, voice recordings and architectural blueprints – to defy a pattern of increasingly normalised, gendered violence and understand the life lost. What she finds is Liliana: her sister’s voice crossing time and, like that of so many disappeared and outraged women in Mexico, demanding justice.

Critics Review

A personal and cultural look at femicide in Mexico
New York Times, Editor's Choice
Not everything can be put into words, especially grief and rage, no matter how precise and skilled the writing is. The beauty of this book is that it reaches for that truth regardless, and in doing so, Liliana becomes indelible. She is so fully realized that by the end, the reader is also mourning. I will be thinking of Liliana for a very long time, perhaps forever
Washington Post
Despite her furnace of rage, Rivera Garza maintains perfect composure . . . Each tightly drawn chapter showcases an array of gorgeous images or cadences; few authors deploy fragments as brilliantly, like grenades … Both a master stroke and a critical inflection point in her country’s brutal, patriarchal politics
Boston Globe
Anger at this lack of accountability seethes through Ms Rivera Garza’s book. Her main goal, however, is not an abstract analysis of femicide but to chronicle a life lost to it. She does so movingly . . . Absorbing and poetic
Economist
By displaying the fragmented, liminal space in which Liliana and her friends discuss Liliana’s life, Rivera Garza is bearing witness to the dearth of ways they had to speak about violence that was right in front of them . . . Rivera Garza’s book makes me certain, it shouldn’t be a woman’s responsibility to teach society about the dangers she faces
New York Times
A moving, heart-wrenching memoir as well as an unflinching appraisal of the widespread violence against women in Mexico
Kirkus
Liliana’s Invincible Summer bravely examines society’s methodical misogyny and the devastating long-term effects a murder has on a family. How grief keeps a different clock. How a family are placed in limbo land. But most moving of all is the way a bereaved sister manages to give Liliana back her voice so that Liliana is brimful of life
Jackie Kay
Rivera Garza’s book is a blueprint of one woman’s murder, but it is the trail of hundreds of thousands of women throughout the globe. I was shaken and alerted by her investigation into her own grief. It has educated me to speak up as she has bravely done
Sandra Cisneros
Warning: Cristina Rivera Garza is an explosive writer. A dexterous creator of atmospheres, with a powerful style, an evocative and indomitable language
Lina Merwane, praise for Cristina Rivera Garza
Cristina Rivera Garza is a masterful storyteller. Through extensive research she reconstructs her sister’s murder and the investigation that followed. Though deeply personal, this work is also a strong protest against the high number of femicides in Mexico and the absence of justice
Jennifer Clement, author of GUN LOVE
[Rivera Garza] has written something almost miraculous: not a cold case file or a true crime, but an attempt to recover Liliana’s life, her spark, her youth, taken away with such cruelty that somehow society has failed to condemn with enough fury . . . Full of tenderness and beauty. This book is a revelation and a restoration of her sister’s memory from victim to vibrant young woman
Mariana Enriquez, author of THE DANGERS OF SMOKING IN BED
The heart-filled writing of this genre-bending book is a political act, a manifesto against patriarchy and the ‘straightjacket of machismo.’ In a just world Liliana’s Invincible Summer would become required reading, and maybe then, just maybe, women can begin to live in a safer world
Javier Zamora, author of SOLITO and UNACCOMPANIED
Sisterhood as mystery, yearning, and ghosted affection. Cristina was as close to her sister in life, as she was distant from her after Liliana’s tragic and untimely death. It is this unreconcilable divide, and Cristina’s efforts to bridge it, that makes Liliana’s Invincible Summer a haunting testimony
Quiara Alegría Hudes, author of MY BROKEN LANGUAGE
Reading this astounding, lyrical, and brilliant book will open your heart and break it, leaving you more vulnerable to both love and rage . . . Read this book to find yourself in powerful company with all who demand justice and with it a new world
Julie Carr, author of REAL LIFE
In a world that denies women justice, how do we attend to those killed by femicide? Held by Garza’s exquisite prose, we remember, we grieve, we rage. Reimagining what archives can do, Rivera Garza excavates police reports, diary accounts, interviews, and memory, compiling a memoir where nothing escapes grief’s investigation – not love, injustice, the self, sisterhood, state violence, patriarchy, the pleasure of women. Our remaining task? To find new means to attend to and protect one another. To miss Liliana, too
Hafizah Augustus Geter, author of THE BLACK PERIOD and UN-AMERICAN

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Liliana’s Invincible Summer

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