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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.
Published | 16 Mar 2023 |
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Format | Hardback |
Edition | 1st |
Extent | 320 |
ISBN | 9781526649348 |
Imprint | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Dimensions | 216 x 135 mm |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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
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