A 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST A NEW YORK TIMES EDITOR'S CHOICE '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.
