Liliana's Invincible Summer

A Sister's Search for Justice

By: Cristina Rivera Garza

Narrated by: Victoria Villarreal

Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

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 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Critic reviews

"Meticulously written and deeply moving - 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. A triumph." (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)

"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)