Liliana's Invincible Summer
A Sister's Search for Justice
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Liliana's Invincible Summer
Narrated by:
Victoria Villarreal
Buy Now for ₹650.61
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Narrated by:
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Victoria Villarreal
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Written by:
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Cristina Rivera Garza
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR MEMOIR
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.©2023 Cristina Rivera Garza (P)2023 Penguin Random House LLC
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Critic Reviews
A personal and cultural look at femicide in Mexico
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
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
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
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
A moving, heart-wrenching memoir as well as an unflinching appraisal of the widespread violence against women in Mexico
Liliana’s Invincible Summer bravely examines society’s methodical misogyny and the devastating long-term effects a murder has on a family. How grief keeps a different clock. How a family are placed in limbo land. But most moving of all is the way a bereaved sister manages to give Liliana back her voice so that Liliana is brimful of life (Jackie Kay)
Rivera Garza’s book is a blueprint of one woman’s murder, but it is the trail of hundreds of thousands of women throughout the globe. I was shaken and alerted by her investigation into her own grief. It has educated me to speak up as she has bravely done (Sandra Cisneros)
Warning: Cristina Rivera Garza is an explosive writer. A dexterous creator of atmospheres, with a powerful style, an evocative and indomitable language (Lina Merwane, praise for Cristina Rivera Garza)
Cristina Rivera Garza is a masterful storyteller. Through extensive research she reconstructs her sister’s murder and the investigation that followed. Though deeply personal, this work is also a strong protest against the high number of femicides in Mexico and the absence of justice (Jennifer Clement, author of GUN LOVE)
Liliana
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