Death Takes Me from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Cristina Rivera Garza is the award-winning author of The Taiga Syndrome and The Iliac Crest, among many other books. Her memoir Liliana’s Invincible Summer won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir and Autobiography and was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, Rivera Garza is the M. D. Anderson Distinguished Professor in Hispanic Studies and director of the PhD programme in creative writing in Spanish at the University of Houston.This detective novel radically scrambles what we think of, and how we relate to, the genre ... The case [is] “full of psychological nooks and crannies. Of poetic shadows. Gender traps. Metaphors. Metonyms.” That also describes Rivera Garza’s exceptional style, and the <b>deeply rewarding experience</b> of reading <i>Death Takes Me</i>. The novel is dense and elliptical, <b>a dreamscape with a powerful undertow</b> ... [A] <b>harrowing and labyrinthine masterpiece</b>
New York Times
A<b> subversive</b> twist on the traditional serial killer story
Time
Rivera Garza, who won a Pulitzer prize last year for her memoir of femicide in Mexico, plays with form, blending fiction with an essay complete with footnotes, satirising media coverage, incorporating comments on the publication of the book we’re reading, and generally having fun. <b>Her exuberance is contagious.</b> “Reading shouldn’t be so complicated,” says one character. “A matter of turning the page.” Of course, it’s both
Spectator
When is a novel not a novel, and when is a novel more than a novel? <i>Death Takes Me</i>, the new novel by Cristina Rivera Garza, juggles these ideas and doesn't let them drop in a story that is <b>part crime fiction, part poetry, part thesis and so many things besides</b> ... All those genres and ways of thinking can be found in this book
- Ian McMillan on 'The Verb',
Rivera Garza’s dazzling prose here becomes sharper than ever … <b>Obsessive, dreamlike and hallucinatory</b>, <i>Death Takes Me</i> <b>lingers inside your brain long after you’ve read it</b>
- Layla Martínez,
An <b>extraordinary, fiercely imaginative</b> novel, written with the precision of a true master of her craft … <b>I couldn’t put it down</b>
- Juan Gómez-Jurado,
The novel brilliantly melds the grit and pacing of a police procedural with literary theory ... It’s all seamlessly conveyed in Rivera Garza’s incisive and poetic style. <b>Life and literature become one in this singular achievement</b>
Publishers Weekly
‘A labyrinthine masterpiece’ New York Times
‘A subversive twist on the traditional serial killer story’ TIME
‘Obsessive, dreamlike and hallucinatory’ Layla Martinez
A city is always a cemetery.
When a professor named Cristina stumbles upon the corpse of a man in a dark alley, she finds a stark warning on the brick wall beside the body, scrawled in coral nail polish: ‘Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.’
After reporting the crime to the police, the professor becomes the main informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. As the bodies of more men are found, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems, and the stream of violence spreading throughout the city.
A dark and dazzling literary thriller that flips the traditional crime narrative on its head, Death Takes Me explores with masterful imagination the unstable terrains of gender and violence, death and desire.
A TIME MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK FOR 2025
Translated by Sarah Booker and Robin Myers