Writing
Lion
A Novel
February 2025
Published by
New York Review Books
Lion is about an unlikely parent, more legend than presence in his daughter’s life. He is a charismatic, dashing bon-vivant, a polo player, race car driver, cocaine addict, ex-con, pilot, and sky-diver. Born in the aftershocks of Argentina’s greatest earthquake, he is like a minor god who comes down to earth in a grand manner, falling in all the ways there are to fall. “It is hard to compete with adrenalin when you are a child,” his daughter writes, now a mother herself to young children whose settled upbringing prompts her to consider her unconventional youth and the source of its chaos, her, by turns, loving, maddening, and magnetic father.
Lion is a double portrait told in a perpetual present tense that moves back and forth between present-day Los Angeles, where the narrator lives with her family and works as an actress, and the past of her peripatetic childhood, spent shuttling between her mother in England, boarding school, and her father and his successive wives in Buenos Aires and Lima.
Sonya Walger’s stunning autobiographical debut is an emotionally acute palimpsest of a novel about a father and daughter, in which the drama and incident, love and tragedy that make up his life make up hers as well. The legend of his life and her distinctive and imaginatively charged telling of it make for an engrossing and unforgettable family saga.
*****
“A breath-taking novel, dream-like and courageous, brimming with glamour and disastrous scarcities.”
—
Susie Boyt, author of Loved & Missed
*****
“Lion by Sonya Walger is everything a reader could want. It's personal and vast at once: profound and fun, deft linguistically and psychologically, fresh as a flower. Best of all, there's that sprinkling of magic you get only in the rarest novels. Just open it.”
—
Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life (National Book Critics Circle Award)
*****
“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, author of Leave the World Behind (National Book Award nominee)
Literary Agent
Mia Vitale at
Park Fine Literary & Media
+1 212.691.3500
[email protected]
Acting Agent
David De Camillo at
The Gersh Agency
+1 310.205.5853
[email protected]
Manager
Jon Rubinstein at
Authentic Management
+1 718.422.0200
[email protected]
