blog — January 20

SAD TIGER is a FINALIST for the National Book Critics Circle’s Gregg Barrios Award for Books in Translation!

We’re thrilled to share that Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, translated from French by Natasha Lehrer, was chosen as a finalist for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle’s Gregg Barrios Award for Books in Translation!

Neige Sinno has created a powerful literary form with Sad Tiger, a book that took France by storm and has become 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. Especially teenagers.” —Annie Ernaux

Sad Tiger is built on the facts of a series of devastating events. Neige Sinno was 7 years old when her stepfather started sexually abusing her and at 14 or 15 the abuse stopped. 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, woven together with documents and thoughts like a peculiar personal investigation, 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.

PRAISE FOR SAD TIGER

"I need everyone to stop what they're doing and read this book; I started it last night and finished it this morning, breaking only to sleep." —Catherine Lacey

"[A] richly literary and starkly shattering account of childhood sexual abuse. . . [T]he author of ‘Sad Tiger’ is aiming for her own quiet revolution.” —Leslie Camhi, The New Yorker

“‘You have looked evil in the eye,’ Sinno writes in “Sad Tiger,” her achingly vivid, cerebral memoir of her abuse and its long aftermath, ‘and now no one can look at you.’ First published in France in 2023, where it won multiple awards including the Le Monde Literary Prize, the Prix Femina and the Goncourt des Lycéens, “Sad Tiger” eschews the 10-foot pole for the scalpel, approaching the subjects of pedophilia and incest with the determined curiosity of a forensic pathologist. Sinno dissects not only her own memories and their impact on the ensuing decades of her life but also the perspective of her abuser. . . . Close-reading her own shards of memory alongside these texts, Sinno contends with both the power and the inevitable impotence of writing, particularly about abuse.” —Lauren Christensen, The New York Times Book Review

“The U.S. debut from French writer Sinno blends autobiography and literary criticism for a staggering portrait of her rapist. . . . Sinno’s prose is equal parts raw and lucid, and it’s enriched by fascinating readings of the sexual abuse depicted in Lolita and other works of literature.This is brilliant.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A work of immolation and rebirth, of winking and wincing, Neige Sinno's mesmerizing interdisciplinary memoir, in Natasha Lehrer's excellent translation, illuminates the darkness and it burns the house down.” —Chad Felix, Center for the Art of Translation

“When it came out in France, Neige Sinno’s heart-stopping Sad Tiger, which pieces together in fragments the lifelong impact of the sexual abuse of a girl in the French Alps by her mountain guide stepfather, blew the literary world apart. Its experimental form of creative nonfiction – a memoir that ditches linear narrative, yet races along like a thriller – was hailed as groundbreaking, the book an instant classic.” —Angelique Chrisafis, The Guardian

“[An] extraordinary personal and literary examination of child sexual abuse and its aftermath. . . . What makes Sinno’s deeply personal book exceptional is that so many impersonal questions crop up again and again, ones that cannot be answered but all the same must be asked.” —Elias Altman, Bookforum

“In spite of her reservations about making art out of trauma, Sinno braids together personal narrative with cultural and literary criticism, analyzing the portrayal of victims and perpetrators across books and film. She toys with the nuances of genre and various storytelling forms, invoking fairy tales, poetry, and legal documents. . . . Sinno has compiled a precise and sweeping depiction of the harm wrought by childhood sexual abuse. . . . Sinno refuses to impose an artificial happy ending and invites the reader into the ambiguity of living with trauma. Sad Tiger extends to its reader the opportunity to witness, and to wrestle.” —McKenzie Watson-Fore, Full Stop