Lion
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"A breathtaking novel, dreamlike and courageous, brimming with glamour and disastrous scarcities." --Susie Boyt
Lion is the story of a father and a daughter. The father is the unlikeliest of fathers. He is a charismatic bon vivant, a polo player, race-car driver, cocaine addict, ex-con, pilot, and skydiver. He is like a minor god who comes down to earth in a grand manner, falling in all the ways there are to fall. Lion moves back and forth between present-day Los Angeles, where the daughter lives and works as an actress, and the past of her peripatetic childhood in England, Argentina, and Peru. "It is hard to compete with adrenalin when you are a child," she writes, now a mother herself to young children whose settled upbringing prompts her to consider her unconventional youth and the source of its chaos.
Sonya Walger's stunning autobiographical debut is an emotionally acute palimpsest of a novel, full of drama and incident, love and tragedy. The legend of the father's life and her distinctive and imaginatively charged telling of it make for an engrossing and unforgettable family saga.
About this Author
Sonya Walger is a British-American actress, writer and podcaster. Walger began her career as a film and television actress in 1998 and is perhaps best known for her role as Penny Widmore in the ABC series Lost and later for starring as Molly Cobb in the Apple TV+ original For All Mankind. A student of English literature at Christ Church College at the University of Oxford and host of the literature podcast bookish, Walger is a long-time literary enthusiast whose debut novel Lion is a work of autofiction about her relationship with her father.
Reviews
"Actor Walger debuts with a piercing autobiographical novel about a woman's relationship with her charismatic but neglectful father.... the dual themes of shame and overwhelming love are beautifully expressed, and the portrait of the father's tragic arc is at once sweeping and precise... It's a revelation." -- Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"No parent is perfect; that's a condition of being a human. The accomplishment of Sonya Walger's novel is in seeking to understand a charmingly imperfect dad--charismatic but chaotic, doting when he's not distracted--rather than condemn him. Lion is a beautifully written and ultimately deeply moving book, a powerful debut.' --Rumaan Alam
"Lion by Sonya Walger is everything a reader could want. It's personal and vast at once: profound and fun, deft linguistically and psychologically. Best of all, there's that sprinkling of magic you get only in the rarest novels." --Darin Strauss
"Littered with disappointments and betrayals, Lion might well have made grim reading. Instead, we are given a seductive work of autobiographical fiction with stories that seem too good to be invented."
--Anna Mundow, Wall Street Journal
"Lion is a poignant story of heaven and earth; a godlike man unable to fully be a father, and his grounded daughter, who despite everything continues to look up at the sky with love." --Tomoé Hill, Financial Times
"Walger's story reminds us that loss braids elegantly with reverence, and it is a demonstration of how painfully irresistible it can be to construct your life around an enticing void." --Jacob Brogan, Washington Post
"Told in short, powerful chapters that are always in the present tense, Walger shares evocative details about her dad, a charismatic rogue who, among his exploits, took up skydiving in his late 50s." --Erik Pedersen, Pasadena Star-News
"Walger is in complete command throughout, relying on playful narrational techniques such as first-person free indirect, Cohnian autonomous monologue, and immersive memory to render both those aspects of his life that overlapped with her own and those that did not." --D.W. White, Chicago Review of Books
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