Liliana's Invincible Summer: A Sister's Search for Justice

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK A searing account of grief and the quest to bring her sisters murderer to justice years after the fact (The Boston Globe), from one of Mexicos greatest living writers (Jonathan Lethem). Part memoir, part true-crime story, Garzas 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. Its 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. Lilianas Invincible Summer is the accountand the outcomeof 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 sisters history, depicting everything from Lilianas 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 evidencehandwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, interviews with Lilianas loved onesto document her sisters 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 isand what she fights fortoday.