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Neige Sinno is a French writer who has studied American literature in the United States and Mexico and has worked as a translator and literature professor. She is the author of two previous books, Le Camion and La Vie des rats. More about this author >
Natasha Lehrer is a prize-winning writer and translator. She writes for the Times Literary Supplement, The Observer, and The Guardian, among others, and has translated works by Chantal Thomas, Vanessa Springora, Amin Maalouf, Victor Segalen, Robert Desnos, and Georges Bataille. More about this author >
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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 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 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.
Neige Sinno remembers her childhood brutalized by sexual abuse and examines with intense and unflinching care the fearful symmetries of victim and torturer from family incest to state terror. Reflecting on scholarly legacies about abuse, Sad Tiger intertwines autobiography and literary criticism to create a new narrative. Natasha Lehrer’s sharp and tender translation from the French deftly imparts the work’s complexity, churning with innocence and terror, from triste to sad.
Natasha Lehrer & Tess Gunty for Neige Sinno at the 2025 National Book Awards Finalist Reading
