Kirjahaku

"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.

"Je suis femme maison." "You are a wifehouse? Oh, a housewife. Je suis une femme au foyer." "Wow, that actually sounds worse in French. Let's go with je suis mère." He is drenched in youth, this young man, she thinks. He is soaked in all its possibilities. Following years of a life lived as a wife and mother, Annie is gifted French lessons with twenty-six-year-old local French tutor, Thierry. As time passes and the lessons progress, she finds herself unexpectedly vulnerable to the charms of a man closer in age to her teenage daughter than to her own. A new life for Annie emerges, one she could never have foreseen . . . Told over the course of one year through the shifting perspectives of wife, husband, lover, best friend and children, Walger paints a contradictory, nuanced portrait of a woman who walks away from every role that tradition and society have expected of her.

"Je suis femme maison." "You are a wifehouse? Oh, a housewife. Je suis une femme au foyer." "Wow, that actually sounds worse in French. Let's go with je suis mere." He is drenched in youth, this young man, she thinks. He is soaked in all its possibilities. Annie and Hector have been hosting family friends in the guest house of their Connecticut home for many months. As a thank you, Annie is gifted French lessons with a twenty-six-year-old local French tutor, Thierry. Hector, an actor, goes to Argentina to film on location, leaving Annie to single-parent their two kids. As life and the lessons progress, she finds herself unexpectedly vulnerable to the charms of a man closer in age to her teenage daughter than to her own. A new life for Annie emerges, one she could never have foreseen. Bookended by two Christmas lunches and told over the course of one year through the shifting perspectives of wife, husband, lover, best friend and children, Walger paints a contradictory, nuanced portrait of a woman who walks away from every role that tradition and society have expected of her.