Cristina Garza

Deeply personal and politically acute, in Autobiography of Cotton, Rivera Garza crafts a new kind of border novel that tells how a brittle land radically altered her grandparents’ lives and the territories they helped develop. In this intimate fictionalisation, Rivera Garza reveals a rich social history of agricultural colonisation, labour activism, environmental degradation and cross-border migration.

beware of me, my love beware of the silent woman in the desert… These are the words the Professor finds, scrawled in nail polish, above the mutilated corpse of a man. She reports the crime to the police and becomes the first informant in an investigation led by the Detective, who has a newfound obsession with poetry. As the bodies of more men are discovered alongside cryptic lines of verse, it becomes clear that this is only one in a string of crimes - all connected, all with literary clues. As the Professor becomes wrapped up in the murders, the boundaries of story - and of genre - break down. Can the Detective decipher the meaning of the poems in time to stop the spread of violence?

‘A labyrinthine masterpiece’ New York Times‘A subversive twist on the traditional serial killer story’ TIME‘Obsessive, dreamlike and hallucinatory’ Layla MartinezA 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 2025Translated by Sarah Booker and Robin Myers