Oxford-educated actress Sonya Walger's stunning debut novel, Lion, is a first-person narrative of an unnamed daughter captivated by her absentee Argentinian father. The father, also unnamed, leaves lovers and daughters strewn behind him across several continents as he chases adrenaline. He's a race-car driver, skydiver, a cocaine user, and, for a time, a prisoner. He seems to have either too much money or none at all.
Walger writes about the narrator's origins: a whirlwind romance between her 18-year-old, inexperienced English mother and her father, newly returned to Madrid from a dubious venture in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Five years later, her father is a broke mooch who abandons his young wife and child for other pursuits. Although this seems to be his modus operandi, the women in his orbit are as enthralled with him as the narrator. "I have never pushed my father's hands away, I have only ever reached for them," she states, though she could be speaking for any of the women in the novel. Indeed, the entire book reads like an account of reaching for someone just beyond grasping.
Despite understanding the destruction that comes with reaching for this unavailable man, Walger employs hypnotic prose that makes it impossible for readers to look away. She succeeds at this while also keeping the novel's sense of time fluid, sometimes writing from an adult perspective, when the narrator has two children, a husband, and a life and career of her own; other times, she writes from the narrator's childhood perspective. The portrait Walger creates of the father is complex, despite his despicable traits, which is a testament to Walger's observation of humanity. --Nina Semczuk, writer, editor, and illustrator