Sad Tiger

by Neige Sinno · 2025

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 ErnauxNATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE, LONGLISTSad 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.