Month: April 2025

Speaking about the art and craft of historical fiction in 2017, Hilary Mantel said she became a novelist because she had believed that it was too late for her to become a historian. When her first, monumental work about the French Revolution failed to find a publisher, she turned her attention instead to stories with a tighter focus, a more restricted circle of characters. But her reason for writing – and her way of thinking about history – remained unaltered. ‘The historian and the biographer follow a trail of evidence, usually a paper trail,’ Mantel explains. ‘The novelist does that too, and then performs another act: puts the past back into process, into action, frees the people from the archive and lets them run about, ignorant of their fates, with all their mistakes unmade.’

The same words might be said – might especially be said – of the novelist who chooses to base their work around the story of a crime that really happened. True crime is simply history as viewed through a particular lens, and as Mantel herself vividly argues, the historical record can only ever be partial. The reader looks to the novelist more as a companion than as a teacher, someone willing to accompany them on their journey into the past. Someone who will put the questions they themselves might ask.

There is some marvellous true crime writing out there: books that reconstruct trials, that pick apart police investigations, that interrogate the psychology of criminals and investigate their background. There are books that help us come to know the victims and to honour their memories. Some of these books are factual reconstructions, some are investigative journalism. Others are novels. In writing A Granite Silence I knew from the beginning that I wanted to use my skills as a novelist to take the reader back in time, to lead them to the street where the crime took place, to allow them to know the people who lived there as if they were their neighbours. I wanted to be free to glance off to one side, to let my imagination wander, to think about people whose lives are missing from the historical record.

True crime novelists, like historians, are passionate about the question of what really happened. I find constant inspiration in the work of those writers who have felt drawn to certain stories, who have followed them into the crannies behind the headlines. Writers who find their own way of telling the truth. Here are thirteen of them.

Harriet by Elizabeth Jenkins (1934). Elizabeth Jenkins was a novelist, an historian and a biographer. She also wrote two important works of true crime fiction, which deserve to be better known. Harriet is an imaginative reconstruction of the so-called Penge Murder of 1877 in which four people conspired to cause the death of a vulnerable woman, Harriet Richardson, and her young child Tommy. Harriet, who had learning difficulties, had been left a large sum of money by an aunt – money Louis Staunton, a friend of the family, was keen to get his hands on. What happened to Harriet was horrific; it was also as complicated, unlikely and bizarre as the plot of any opera. Jenkins, who was born in 1905, remembered people still talking about the case fifty years after it happened. She tells Harriet’s desperate and enthralling story with precision, insight and empathy.   

A Pin to See the Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse (1934). When Edith Thompson and Freddie Bywaters were jointly accused of murdering Edith’s husband Percy in 1922, the case caught the public imagination to such an extent that it dominated the newspaper headlines for many weeks. A hundred years later and more, it is still exciting debate. In her fictional recreation of the ‘Ilford Murder’, Fryn Tennyson Jesse’s protagonist is Julia Starling, a young woman from a lower middle class background who marries deadly dull Herbert and finds herself falling for Leo, a young airman. With Leo often away on duty, Julia pours all of her dissatisfaction and longing into her letters. She begins to entertain fantasies of killing Herbert, and when the fantasy becomes a reality her letters turn into a weapon to be used against her. Fryn Tennyson Jesse – a great-niece of the poet – had a lifelong interest in true crime. Her 1924 book Murder and its Motives is still in print, and she wrote introductions to six of the Notable British Trials series, including the notorious trial of Timothy Evans and John Christie in 1957. She was a remarkable writer, whose journalism took her into war reporting and whose novelistic imagination surely made her identify with Edith Thompson, a woman whose ‘trial by media’ saw her executed on no other evidence than the fantasies of murder she had written down.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966). This is the one novel that inevitably crops up on every true crime reading list. There’s a reason for that, which is that it really is as good as everyone says, a book that anyone with an interest in true crime would have to read. Capote’s novel is often credited with being the first of its kind, which isn’t strictly true. What is true is that in Capote’s hands, this account of a Midwestern farming family and their murder at the hands of two disaffected young criminals attains the dimensions of classical tragedy. Capote has been accused of displaying too much sympathy for the murderers and insufficient attention to their victims, but I suspect that at least some of those who have said this have not read the book. What we get from Capote is restraint, empathy, a measured objectivity and just brilliant writing.  

The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer (1979). It’s not difficult to trace the lineage from Capote’s In Cold Blood to Mailer’s magnum opus, which in its turn was the direct inspiration for Gordon Burn’s book about Peter Sutcliffe, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son. Mailer’s novel tells the story of Gary Gilmore, a convicted armed robber who went on to commit two murders and who was the first person to be executed in the US following a moratorium on the death penalty that had lasted almost a decade. Like Capote, Mailer went directly to the source, interviewing friends, family and associates of Gilmore as well as police and legal counsel. His coverage of the trial and the debate around the death penalty – Gilmore refused to appeal his sentence – could have been a book in itself. I was only ten when Gilmore was executed but I have vivid memories of the headline news – indeed this was almost certainly my first and horrified realization of the fact that executions could still happen outside of the history books.

Mary Swann by Carol Shields (1987). An innovative, densely textured novel that makes use of both poetry and playscript, Mary Swann is the story of a ‘lost’ Canadian poet who grew up poor in rural Canada and whose death at the age of forty remains a mystery. The novel examines the effect of the poet’s life and death on various individuals in her orbit, including her would-be biographer and a shy provincial librarian. Shields wrote Mary Swann as a homage to the Vancouver poet Pat Lowther, who was brutally murdered by her husband Roy in 1975. Pat Lowther was prodigiously talented – her first poem was published in a local newspaper when she was ten. Roy was a failed poet, and bitterly jealous of his wife’s growing success. According to his daughter from a previous marriage, he was also violent and extremely troubled. With its literary theme, innovative form and embedded sense of mystery, Mary Swann was one of the novels that first awakened my interest in writing based around true events.

Libra by Don DeLillo (1988). There is a forensic quality to all of DeLillo’s writing, a pared-back brilliance that makes it a natural fit for true crime subjects, and here in Libra we get his take on one of the biggest. The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1963 has probably spawned more words on paper than any other murder (with the possible exception of Jesus of Nazareth) but DeLillo’s deep dive into the mind and chequered history of Lee Harvey Oswald is remarkable for very deliberately blending historical fact with imagined scenarios. DeLillo shows how the assassination could have happened – whilst maintaining his own stated belief that the truth behind Kennedy’s murder is most likely lost to history. Unsurprisingly, Libra generated plenty of controversy in the US. A review in the Washington Post accused DeLillo of being a bad citizen. ‘If novelists are bad citizens,’ DeLillo countered, ‘we’re doing our job.’ He gets my vote every time.

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (1996). The Grace of the title is Grace Marks, a servant in the house of Canadian farmer and landowner Thomas Kinnear. In July 1843, Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery, with whom he was having an affair, were shot and bludgeoned to death by James McDermott, another servant of the house and Grace’s lover. McDermott and Marks fled to the US, where they were soon apprehended. Both were convicted, though Marks was spared the death penalty. Before he was hanged, McDermott made a statement blaming Grace for the crimes, insisting that she was the ‘evil genius’ behind the plan, and that she had feigned madness in order to escape the gallows. Atwood’s novel takes place after the murders. Grace has been committed to an asylum and is something of a cause celebre. A doctor, Simon Jordan, is determined to win Grace’s confidence and to discover the truth: was Grace involved in the murders, or not? In the novel, as in life, the question remains unresolved.

Red Riding quartet by David Peace (1999 – 2002). Peace’s first four published novels take place against the background of the Yorkshire Ripper murders, with the investigating police force revealed as corrupt, inefficient, and riven by internal feuds. Some characters keep returning from book to book; others are killed off, their deaths a warning to anyone trying to discover who was responsible. Peace’s language is bold, stark, uncompromising, as is his portrait of the social and political landscape that formed the backdrop to his own adolescence. It’s difficult to overstate the impact these books had on me when I first read them, most of all for their subverting of crime genre stereotypes. Peace does not offer any of the comforts of traditional crime fiction. What he offers is brilliant writing and an honesty about the nature of violence and the impact of poverty that few writers have matched. 

Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel by Gordon Burn (2008). Though Gordon Burn’s career was cut tragically short – he died of cancer in 2009 at the age of sixty-one – the books he left behind have been powerfully influential. To write his 1984 book on the Yorkshire Ripper, Burn spent most of two years living in Sutcliffe’s home town, getting to know his friends and family in order to gain an authentic insight into his background. Burn’s later book about Fred and Rosemary West, Happy Like Murderers, saw him immersing himself in trial transcripts, police interviews and many other other first-hand accounts. Researching this horrific material had a severe impact on Burn’s mental health, and he said he would never write another true crime book. His final novel, Born Yesterday is the closest he came to revisiting the territory, a kaleidoscopic portrait of a single year – 2007 – and the news events that defined it, most notably the abduction and disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Burn said that he hoped the novel might give future readers a sense of how the raw material of news gets refashioned as history. It is a remarkable achievement. I have read this book several times now and am still hypnotized by it.

The Kills by Richard House (2013). In the vastness and complexity of its structure – four standalone novels that combine to create a single overarching narrative – The Kills bears comparison with David Peace’s Red Riding quartet. There are plenty of murders in The Kills, but the true crime being examined is the political chicanery, economic exploitation and environmental vandalism perpetrated by US-government-backed big business in the aftermath of the Iraq war. The ‘War on Terror’ kickstarted by 9/11 is revealed as a free-for-all in which the only working currencies are money and violence. As well as being a masterpiece of formal invention, The Kills is a thrilling, disquieting, thought-provoking piece of fiction that reveals bitter truths about our own time. 

Dead Girls by Selva Almada translated by Annie McDermott (2020). Roberto Bolano’s 2004 novel 2666 was one of the first to openly address the crime of femicide in Latin America. Since Bolano we have seen pioneering work in true crime writing by Laura Restrepo, Fernanda Melchor, Mariana Enriquez and Cristina Rivera Garza among others. In Dead Girls, Selva Almada concentrates her attention on three young Argentinian women who were murdered for their gender in the 1980s, exploring their backgrounds and circumstances as well as the political backdrop against which their killings took place. Almada is one of a brilliant new generation of South American writers whose approach, blending journalistic with fictional techniques, has brought new energy and viewpoints into contemporary true crime writing.

The Treatment by Michael Nath (2020). Here is a novel that shows what is possible when fact and fiction come together in the mind of a writer whose imagination is as fertile as his talent with words. Nath bases The Treatment around the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry and the decades-long struggle to unmask institutionalized racism within the Metropolitan Police. A journalist, Carl Hyatt, has been fired from the broadsheet he worked for after his investigation into a corrupt property developer risks getting them sued. He’s been forced to take a job with the Chronicle, a free-ads paper. But in spite of promising his wife that he’ll stay away from the story, Carl’s obsession with uncovering the truth is about to lead him and those he cares about into mortal danger. The Treatment is a postmodern take on the Elizabethan revenge drama, delivered in a bravura mix of poetry, street slang and Multicultural London English. Nath exercises superb command of his material in a novel that demands a second reading to fully appreciate its inventiveness.   

Babysitter by Joyce Carol Oates (2023). Oates has frequently takes inspiration for her work from true crimes, and the background to Babysitter is a series of unsolved child murders that took place in Detroit in the mid-1970s. The novel follows Hannah, the wife of a rich but rather dull businessman. She begins an affair with a total stranger, who refuses to reveal anything about his background or even his real name. He is powerful, controlling and violently unpredictable – but for Hannah that is part of the attraction. Oates’s narrative is multi-stranded, with Hannah only gradually becoming alive to what is going on in her own neighbourhood. Babysitter is brilliantly imagined and richly characterised, with a genuine sense of menace. Keeping the external events at one remove – glimpsed from the corner of the eye – gives the reader a queasy and increasing awareness of the danger Hannah is in.

I’m reading Helen Garner’s diary at the moment, or rather her diaries, the three volumes recently released in the UK as a compendium, beginning soon after the publication of her first novel Monkey Grip in 1978 and carrying us through to the late 1990s. I’m currently in the middle of the eighties, just after the publication of perhaps her best-known work The Children’s Bach, which more or less coincides with the end of her second marriage. People talk about the clarity of her gaze, her merciless self-scrutiny and while all of that is true, what strikes me again and again is the calibre of her ambition, her genuine terror that she might not live up to her own high standards. She compares herself constantly with other writers and finds herself wanting, a necessary discipline that does not in the least diminish her ever-present joy in the practice of reading.

Even in the midst of life – and hers is an immensely social life, a tangled mass of friendships and rivalries and love affairs and motherhood – writing is central. She never seeks to downplay its importance and how I love her for that. I don’t believe in keeping writing stashed at the back of the cupboard, something that is done in spite of. Writing is because.

Garner has arranged her diaries as a series of vignettes. Only the years are given as a guide to where we are in her life. Individual entries are undated. They are like film stills, a pile of postcards, or photographs. You turn them over, one at a time. The year gradually accrues not through numbers but through narrative glimpses. Jump cuts. Sudden revelations. A life to lose yourself in. As I read I keep thinking about how Garner is now in her eighties and so I worry about her. I don’t want to lose her from this world, to lose this voice, this edgy, bracing, self-critical, fearlessly life-loving presence.

I know in advance that this volume will end with only one of Garner’s book-length works of narrative non-fiction out in the world: The First Stone, which was published in 1995. Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) and This House of Grief (2014) will still be ahead of her. But even from where I am now in the 1980s, the qualities that make her a great writer of true crime – the acuity of observation, the rapacious curiosity, a quality of objectivity and a relentless capacity for asking questions, not only of others but especially of self  – are nailed into place.

A surety of line, the apparently effortless ability to make ordinary language carry a meaning and a beauty that rises above itself. Garner, for all her fears to the contrary, is a great writer, period.

The first book of Garner’s I read was This House of Grief, which follows the trial of Robert Farquharson, accused in 2005 of killing his three sons by deliberately driving the car in which they were travelling into a reservoir. Less than a year earlier, Farquharson’s wife Cindy had left him, and Farquharson had become increasingly depressed and resentful as a result. The series of trials that led to Farquharson’s conviction took seven years to unfold, and Garner was present in the courtroom for every hearing. This House of Grief has, perhaps inevitably, been compared with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. But it’s a very different book. Capote’s genius is in excising himself from the text entirely – except in the matter of the quality of his writing. Garner is there. She reveals not only the story but her process in telling it. She speaks and sometimes argues with others who are present, reporting their interactions in intimate detail. Like Capote, she finds herself becoming drawn into the circle of relatives and family friends who have been directly affected by the case. But where Capote rode out the emotional impact of such personal involvement in private, Garner’s difficulties and doubts are made plain in the text, becoming an inalienable part of the story she is telling. She asks the questions we ourselves might want to ask, often remaining openly uncertain about the answers she is given.

There is a perfection to Capote’s work that is somehow unassailable; Garner’s has an immediacy that arises from its openness to scrutiny, through its expressions of doubt, not only about casting judgement but, on occasion, about the whole enterprise.

 As with her frank and self-searching account of a sexual harassment case in The First Stone, some critics found fault with Garner for not paying sufficient attention to the gender-specific aspects of the Farquharson case, most especially the nature and repetitive frequency of male violence. But one of the qualities I value most in Garner is that she has never been interested in filtering her observations or her writing through an ideological lens. She is interested in people and how they respond to the situations they find themselves in. Most of all she is interested in discovering the truth of what really happened.

This House of Grief had a powerful impact on me, not just in the shocking, harrowing story it was telling but in the way it was written. True crime literature has come in for censure – and I mean always, not just right now – for being exploitative, prurient, manipulative and even immoral. I would maintain that this is not a problem of content but of style. If you reach for cliches you will find your narrative lacking in nuance, in objectivity, in accurate reasoning. In any kind of storytelling but most of all when you are dealing in facts – especially painful facts, especially disputed facts – the chief responsibility of the writer is to strive for language that adequately conveys the nature of what is being described.

Exploitative true crime is not so much immoral as badly written. The work of a writer like Helen Garner is the antidote, the antithesis. In revealing to us the conflicted, contradictory and hard-to-discover facts and abiding contradictions of this terrible case she reveals to us ourselves, the extent of our prejudices, the divided nature of the society we live in.

On the day I started writing this, I read an interview in the Guardian with the writer Hallie Rubenhold. Rubenhold rightly gained attention for her 2019 book The Five, in which she re-examines the lives and circumstances of the ‘canonical five’ victims of Jack the Ripper. In shifting the attention away from the women’s killer, she created a compelling new model for true crime literature as well as providing insight into a society that – sometimes subtly, often not at all subtly – insisted that murdered women were to some extent responsible for their own violent deaths. A hundred years later, the same set of attitudes became a determining factor in the botched police investigation of the Yorkshire Ripper murders. If anything proves the need for the shift in thinking Rubenhold is advocating it is surely this. And yet – proving her own point – she ended up becoming the target of online abuse by ‘Ripperologists’, that peculiar subset of true crime enthusiasts who concern themselves with the unsolved (and now unsolvable) mystery of Jack the Ripper.

Certain extreme fringes of the fraternity were incensed, it seems, by all kinds of things: that Rubenhold was not sufficiently immersed in the ‘science’ of Ripperology for her opinion to have any currency; that she ‘hated sex workers’ because she insisted on undertaking a more nuanced (and factually accurate) examination of the victims’ backgrounds; that she dared to suggest that it didn’t matter all that much, actually, who the Ripper was.

They’re a funny bunch, Ripperologists. I’m not going to castigate them for their weird enthusiasm – or only those who go in for online harassment – because to an extent at least I get it. In every writer of true crime there is at least a little of the obsessive, a little of the Ripperologist. What I don’t get is: why Jack? Seriously, guys, we are never going to know. Move on. Rubenhold herself has moved on. Her new book, Story of a Murder, focuses on a crime that took place decades later but that commanded equal column inches at the time. Dr Crippen was often reported in the press as a ‘mild-mannered murderer’; through focusing once again on his victim(s), Rubenhold is intent on showing us that he was no such thing. That indeed there is no such thing.

Rubenhold has some fascinating things to say in her interview about true crime generally. ‘I’m not interested in straight true crime,’ she insists. ‘I’m interested in the darkness in human nature as seen through historical events. And I’m fascinated by how granular you can get in terms of historical understanding; I’m looking at material that a murder throws up – all the witness statements, all the trial papers, all the unspoken human experience.’

I find all this deeply relatable. In writing A Granite Silence, the stuff I kept coming back to was the quotidian detail and circumstance of ordinary lives. The first witnesses called in the trial of Jeannie Donald were working people – a lamplighter, a gas worker, a baker – who happened to be up and about on the street in question before anyone else. I kept coming back to these people – the slaters, the rag-and-bone men and especially the lamplighters. Their trade does not even exist now yet in 1934 it was still part of the normal street scene. Such details – like the items of furniture in a room I describe in the first pages of the novel – are luminous to me because they give us an insight into history as it is lived. To quote Rubenhold again, ‘that’s where the story is – it’s about people’s experience.’

I would add though that I think we need to be honest about our attraction to these kinds of stories. There’s a section of the commentariat that insists the current ‘obsession’ with true crime is a new thing, a toxic byproduct of capitalism, or celebrity culture, or (most popularly and inevitably) the internet. But that simply isn’t true. Going back to Jack the Ripper (if we must) the police file of bogus witness statements, prurient and salacious rumour-mongering, false sightings and – yes – dozens of people claiming to be the Ripper is as thick as any amount of similar correspondence they might receive today. Ditto the Yorkshire Ripper enquiry, two full decades before widespread internet use. And the public fascination with high-profile murder cases goes back well before either.

There are many theories as to why that might be. I tend towards the belief that there is something mythic about these stories, something we recognise as being common to all of us. We draw together instinctively behind the headlines in sorrow for the victim, fear of the killer and fascination with the mystery. We feel horror at the violence and a sense of helplessness at the suffering of those left behind. We feel something else, too, something harder to describe. Not excitement so much as déjà vu. These crimes lay bare our fears, our vulnerabilities. We want to read about them because they are part of the definition of who we are.

I know all this, because I feel it, too. It is why I am drawn to write about such things.  

In her truly excellent book Savage Appetites, Rachel Monroe suggests that there are in fact four distinct categories of true crime junkie: those who identify with the victim, those who seek for justice, those who cast themselves in the role of detective and those – a very small group – who see themselves in the killer. Monroe gives potent examples from each category. I find her arguments convincing and compelling and for the record, as both reader and writer I would put myself firmly in the detective camp. I would also say about myself as a writer that I recognise and respond to the powerful energy of the mystery template in fiction and especially in non-fiction, that relentlessly nagging question: what really happened?

Personally, I don’t find anything wrong in this. How a reader – or a writer – relates and responds to true crime stories is a personal matter, the business of their own conscience. For me, that business depends on providing suitably persuasive answers to the question of why I am interested in a particular story, what I can bring to my account of it that might justify and make sense of that interest in literary terms. There have been moments – quite a few of them – in the last twelve months when I have doubted my ability and my desire to work in this field again. But then I have asked myself: what if I am good at it? What if I cannot, now, imagine doing anything else?

In her interview for the Guardian, Hallie Rubenhold reveals that her mother died while she was working on Story of a Murder. ‘It really made me reflect on being a historian, and documenting lives,’ she says. ‘Because there’s a start date and an end date. Life has a finite beginning and a finite end. This is your time. And that’s it.’

Her words for me are powerfully resonant, a true reflection of my own motivations in deciding to focus my attention on this kind of story.

FIVE ESSENTIAL WORKS OF TRUE CRIME WRITTEN BY WOMEN

The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm (1990)

‘[The journalist] is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.’ So opens Janet Malcolm’s interrogation of the ethics of journalism, and true crime journalism in particular. The journalist, Joe McGinniss, befriended and gained the confidence of the murderer, Jeffrey MacDonald, in order to write his bestselling 1983 book Fatal Vision. MacDonald quickly came to see McGinniss as his ‘man on the outside’ and possibly a route to being exonerated. Needless to say he was very, very wrong. Malcolm’s book is itself a kind of true crime narrative, brilliantly written and with a deeply personal understanding of what is at stake.

The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson (2007)

Nelson’s aunt Jane was murdered in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1969, while she was still a student. No one was convicted of the crime. The tragedy had always been there in Nelson’s background, but it wasn’t until 2005 that she addressed it in writing. Jane: A Murder is a hybrid work that includes poetry, prose and reportage to tell Jane’s story and to recover her identity from that of ‘murder victim’. The Red Parts is the continuation of that story some thirty-six years later, when a new suspect is identified and finally brought to trial. Nelson is a writer of powerful originality and both these books offer radical new perspectives on true crime as the subject of literature.

The Murders at White House Farm by Carol Ann Lee (2015)

Carol Ann Lee is a historian and biographer who has written on a number of true crime subjects, including Myra Hindley and Ruth Ellis. The Murders at White House Farm is her exhaustive investigation of the 1985 Jeremy Bamber case, in which the then twenty-four-year-old Bamber was ultimately charged with the murders by shooting of five close relatives including his six-year-old twin nephews. Bamber continues to protest his innocence, now as then blaming his sister Sheila Caffell for the killings. This is one of those cases that now appears to be unsolvable. The only person still alive who knows the truth is Bamber himself – the ultimate unreliable narrator. Lee’s account, like all her work, is quiet, methodical, beautifully written and open to all arguments. Her careful reconstruction of the character, background, personal problems and appalling media portrayal of Sheila Caffell makes this book doubly worthwhile.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara (2018)

As well as being the most problematic, serial killers are for me the least interesting subjects of true crime literature – these men are violent, small-minded, narcissistic misogynists, end of. For this reason I read very few serial-killer-related narratives, especially US ones. Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is the exception, a book that proves that any subject can be a worthy subject if the writer is sincerely motivated and equal to the task. McNamara made it her life’s work to discover the identity of the Golden State Killer, a notorious rapist and murderer who committed his horrific crimes throughout California during the seventies and eighties. McNamara died in 2016 with her book still unfinished and the killer still uncaught. The manuscript was brought to completion by McNamara’s husband, together with an investigative journalist and a true crime writer. The resulting book became an instant bestseller and recharged the continuing cold case with some much needed publicity. The murderer – a retired cop – was finally brought to justice just two months after the book’s publication.   

Liliana’s Invincible Summer by Cristina Rivera Garza (2023)

Rivera Garza’s sister Liliana was murdered in Mexico in 1990. She was just twenty years old. Though the killer’s identity was widely known, he was never arrested. Some thirty years later, Rivera Garza attempts to gain access to the files that were kept on the case. Unwilling to expose themselves to scrutiny or criticism, the police prove to be an active impediment in her search for justice. Rivera Garza’s formally inventive and searching memoir examines the official response to the crime of femicide in Mexico amidst the systemic problems of entrenched machismo and a failure to understand or even recognise the increasing phenomenon of intimate partner violence. It is also a joyful, defiant celebration of Liliana herself, a young woman who, one feels instinctively, would be the first to admire the book that bears her name.