Lion

An engrossing work of autobiographical fiction about the relationship between an actress daughter and her larger-than-life father—the astonishingly assured debut novel of Sonya Walger, actress on Lost, For All Mankind, and more.

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.

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.