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Our bones are our most intimate secret. And some secrets, only our bones can betray.

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On a dark and stormy night, an unnamed narrator is visited by two women: one a former lover, the other a stranger. They ruthlessly question their host and claim to know his greatest secret: that he is, in fact, a woman. In increasingly desperate attempts to defend his masculinity, perplexed by the stranger´s dubious claims to be the writer Amparo Dávila, he finds himself spiralling deeper into a haunted past that may or may not be his own. This surreal novel enfolds a masterful exploration of gender in taut, atmospheric mystery.

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Rivera Garza´s novel succeeds as a suspenseful psychological horror story in the vein of a David Lynch film or Ingmar Bergman´s Persona, as a dissolver of the space between genders, and as a challenge to the cultural erasure of the real-life Dávila. The result is mind-bending.´ Publishers Weekly, starred review´Rivera Garza´s taut language drives the mystery forward, and she plays cleverly with the literary and political histories of Mexico, the importance of queer visibility, and the silencing of female authorship. An existential gothic tale about the high stakes of understanding - and accepting - the self.´ Kirkus Reviews´A key work of Mexican literature.´ Elena Poniatowska´An intelligent, beautiful story about bodies disguised as a story about language disguised as a story about night terrors. Cristina Rivera Garza does not respect what is expected of a writer, of a novel, of language. She is an agitator.´ Yuri Herrera´Warning: Cristina Rivera Garza is an explosive writer yet to be fully accounted for in English. An insubordinate stylist, a skilled creator of atmospheric and haunting language, The Iliac Crest is a willfully queer piece where the workings of her wild imagination destabilize everything.´ Lina Meruane

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