El Invencible Verano de Liliana / Liliana's Invincible Summer (Premio Pulitzer)

«El 16 de julio de 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza, mi hermana, fue vctima de un feminicidio. Era una muchacha de 20 aos, estudiante de arquitectura. Tena aos tratando de terminar su relacin con un novio de la preparatoria que insista en no dejarla ir. Unas cuantas semanas antes de la tragedia, Liliana por fin tom una decisin definitiva: en lo ms crudo del invierno haba descubierto que en ella, como bien lo haba dicho Albert Camus, haba un invencible verano. Lo dejara atrs. Empezara una nueva vida. Hara una maestra y despus un doctorado; viajara a Londres.

La decisin de l fue que ella no tendra una vida sin l. Hace apenas un ao decid abrir las cajas donde depositamos las pertenencias de mi hermana. Su voz atraves el tiempo y, como la de tantas mujeres desaparecidas y ultrajadas en Mxico, demand justicia.

El invencible verano de Liliana es una excavacin en la vida de una mujer brillante y audaz que careci, como nosotros mismos, como todos los dems, del lenguaje necesario para identificar, denunciar y combatir la violencia sexista y el terrorismo de pareja que caracteriza a tantas relaciones patriarcales .

" Enorme! Ojal millones lo lean!" -- Francisco Goldman, autor de Monkey Boy, finalista del Premio Pulitzer de Ficcin 2022

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 NONFICTION NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS

Listed as one of The New York Times' Notable Fiction Books of 2023

A haunting, unforgettable memoir about a beloved younger sister and the painful memory of her murder, from "one of Mexico's greatest living writers" (Jonathan Lethem).

Can you enjoy yourself while you are in pain? The question, which is not new, arises over and over again during that eternity that is mourning.

In the early hours of July 16, 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza was murdered by her abusive ex-boyfriend. A life full of promise and hope, cut tragically short, Liliana's story instead became subsumed into Mexico's dark and relentless history of domestic violence. With Liliana's case file abandoned by a corrupt criminal justice system, her family, including her older sister Cristina, was forced to process their grief and guilt in private, without any hope for justice.

In luminous, poetic prose, Rivera Garza tells a singular yet universally resonant story: that of a spirited, wondrously hopeful young woman who tried to survive in a world of increasingly normalized gendered violence. It traces the story of her childhood, her early romance with a handsome-but possessive and short-tempered-man, through the exhilarating weeks leading up to that fateful July morning, a summer when Liliana loved, thought, and traveled more widely and freely than she ever had before.

Using her remarkable talents as a scholar, novelist, and poet, Cristina Rivera Garza returns to Mexico after decades of living in the United States to collect and curate evidence --handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, architectural blueprints-- in order to render and understand a life beyond the crime itself. Tracing the full arc of their childhood and adolescence in central Mexico, through the painful and confusing years after Liliana's death, Rivera Garza confronts the trauma of losing her sister, and examines from multiple angles how this tragedy continues to shape who she is--and what she fights for--today.