“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.

"Lion, as his friends call him, is 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, Lion 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."--