Seven Stories Press
Sad Tiger
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2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
Winner of multiple prizes, Neige Sinno has created a powerful literary form with Sad Tiger, a book that took France by storm and is an international phenomenon.
"Reading Sad Tiger is like descending into an abyss with your eyes open. It forces you to see, to really see, what it means to be a child abused by an adult, for years. Everyone should read it." --Annie Ernaux
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE, SHORTLIST
Sad Tiger is built on the facts of a series of devastating events. Neige Sinno was seven years old when her stepfather started sexually abusing her. At 19, she decided to break the silence that is so common in all cultures around sexual violence. This led to a public trial and prison for her stepfather and Sinno started a new life in Mexico.
Through the construction of a fragmented narrative, Sinno explores the different facets of memory--her own, her mother's, as well as her abusive stepfather's; and of abuse itself in all its monstrosity and banality. Her account is woven together with a close reading of literary works by Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Christine Angot, and Virginie Despentes among others.
Sad Tiger--the title inspired by William Blake's poem "The Tyger"--is a literary exploration into how to speak about the unspeakable. In this extraordinary book there is an abiding concern: how to protect others from what the author herself endured? In the midst of so much darkness, an answer reads crystal clear: by speaking up and asking questions. A striking, shocking, and necessary masterpiece.
Winner of the Le Monde Literary Prize, 2023
Winner of the European Strega Prize, 2024
Winner of the Prix Femina, 2023
Winner of the Goncourt des Lycéens, 2023
Winner of the US and UK Goncourt Prizes, 2024
Winner of the Le Monde Literary Prize, 2023
Winner of the Inrockuptibles Prize, 2023
Shortlisted for the Medicis Prize, 2023
Shortlisted for the Decembre Prize, 2023
Winner of the Goncourt Prizes in Belgium, Slovakia, India, Turkey, Tunisia, and South Korea, 2023
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Book Details
ISBN:
9781644214671
EAN:
9781644214671
Binding:
Paperback
Pages:
224
Authors:
Neige Sinno
Publisher:
Seven Stories Press
Published Date: 2025-01-04
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I can’t say I truly enjoyed this book. But I couldn’t put it down. It demands that we read, and try to understand. The realization that “ nobody wins” is a difficult conclusion. This should be required reading for so many of us.
Of course the subject matter is intriguing and heartbreaking. But I also learned so much as a writer from reading this exquisite book.
It was well written but a very uncomfortable read.
Incredibly well written, compelling and moving.
An astonishing epistle, well-written, erudite, broad in scope, a must-read, even if you weren't sexually abused as a child or as an adult. And appalling too that the case went forward because her stepfather admitted it in court, and deeply troubling that he really didn't get that what he did was cruel and wrong.
