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.
*****
“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
*****
“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 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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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]
