PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • “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). “Part memoir part true-crime story Garza’s chronicle is both personal and
political.”— The Washington Post A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review
NPR The Washington Post Time Chicago Public Library She Reads Electric Lit October 18
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
Cristina embarks on a path toward justice . Liliana’s Invincible Summer is the account—and the
outcome—of that quest . In luminous poetic prose Rivera Garza tells a singular yet
universally resonant story: Liliana is a spirited wondrously hopeful young woman who tried to
survive in a world of increasingly normalized gendered violence. Rivera Garza traces her
sister’s history depicting everything from Liliana’s early romance with a handsome but
possessive and short-tempered man to that exhilarating final summer of 1990 when she 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.
