Sad Tiger

Finalist of the National Book Awards 2025 for Translated Literature

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.