Death Takes Me

from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author

Cristina Rivera Garza author Robin Myers translator Sarah Booker translator

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Published:25th Feb '25

Should be back in stock very soon

Death Takes Me cover

The dazzling, award-winning novel from one of Mexico’s greatest living writers, translated into English for the first time

Translated by Sarah Booker and Robin Myers

‘A labyrinthine masterpiece’ New York Times
A subversive twist on the traditional serial killer storyTIME
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

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 deeply rewarding experience of reading Death Takes Me. The novel is dense and elliptical, a dreamscape with a powerful undertow ... [A] harrowing and labyrinthine masterpiece * New York Times *
A subversive twist on the traditional serial killer story * Time *
When is a novel not a novel, and when is a novel more than a novel? Death Takes Me, the new novel by Cristina Rivera Garza, juggles these ideas and doesn't let them drop in a story that is part crime fiction, part poetry, part thesis and so many things besides ... 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 … Obsessive, dreamlike and hallucinatory, Death Takes Melingers inside your brain long after you’ve read it -- Layla Martínez
An extraordinary, fiercely imaginative novel, written with the precision of a true master of her craft … I couldn’t put it down -- 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. Life and literature become one in this singular achievement * Publishers Weekly *

ISBN: 9781526649430

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

304 pages