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 PostA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review NPR The Washington
Post Time Chicago Public Library She Reads Electric LitOctober 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.
