Published in 2025
176 pages
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.
What is this book about?
“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.
