
Lion
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Sonya Walger
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By:
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Sonya Walger
About this listen
Lion is about an unlikely parent, more legend than presence in his daughter's life. He is a charismatic, dashing bon-vivant, a polo player, race car driver, cocaine addict, ex-con, pilot, and sky-diver. Born in the aftershocks of Argentina's greatest earthquake, he is like a minor god who comes down to earth in a grand manner, falling in all the ways there are to fall.
Lion is a double portrait told in a perpetual present tense that moves back and forth between present-day Los Angeles, where the narrator lives with her family and works as an actress, and the past of her peripatetic childhood, spent shuttling between her mother in England, boarding school, and her father and his successive wives in Buenos Aires and Lima.
Sonya Walger's stunning autobiographical debut is an emotionally acute palimpsest of a novel about a father and daughter, in which the drama and incident, love and tragedy that make up his life make up hers as well. The legend of his life and her distinctive and imaginatively charged telling of it make for an engrossing and unforgettable family saga.
©2025 Sonya Walger (P)2025 Highbridge AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
A slender novel of epic power and the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below.
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Reflections from above the earth
- By Marcia Morales-Jaffe on 11-24-24
By: Samantha Harvey
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Stone Yard Devotional
- A Novel
- By: Charlotte Wood
- Narrated by: Ailsa Piper
- Length: 6 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of rural Australia. She doesn't believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident.
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A profound inward journey
- By Kathlene barrett on 02-17-25
By: Charlotte Wood
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Raising Hare
- A Memoir
- By: Chloe Dalton
- Narrated by: Louise Brealey
- Length: 6 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and lolloped around your bedroom at night, drumming on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention. Imagine that, over two years later, it still ran in from the fields when you called it and slept in your house for hours on end and gave birth to leverets in your study. For political advisor and speechwriter Chloe Dalton, who spent lockdown deep in the English countryside, far away from her usual busy London life, this became her unexpected reality.
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A beautiful reading of a heartfelt story. I didn’t want it to end.
- By Sparrow on 04-02-25
By: Chloe Dalton
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Twist
- A Novel
- By: Colum McCann
- Narrated by: Colum McCann
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth.
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So happy he’s still writing fiction
- By Franki on 03-31-25
By: Colum McCann
Gorgeous writing!
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Heartachingly beautiful
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Outstanding prose
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At times heartbreaking and at times marvelous we learn about her father’s life and the space she and her siblings had within it.
No family is, in a conventional sense, “normal” but what Sonya gives us is a window into her life with an absent father that through perhaps selfishness led a life of what it felt like complete and utter freedom. And with that freedom comes consequences.. we get a glimpse of what those consequences meant for all those around him and even himself in the end.
As an Argentine and a nomad myself, I felt very connected with her story. And while my father’s absence was different than hers, her commentary on the feelings and deeper understanding of what she went through as a child, through her eyes as an adult with a family of her own now, ring very true.
I recommend this book to everyone. While she describes it as a novel, the autobiographical tones are definitely there. And as one of my favorite actresses, Sonya lets us in on her life story and what a rich story it is.
A wonderful novel about a life that few would dare to tell
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Outstanding novel
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A perfect book club consideration
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One senses that Ms. Walger’s urgency to unpack her complicated relationship with her Dad made this book inevitable. Thankfully she’s got the writing chops and a captivating voice to share it all. She affords us insight, if we have the guts to actively experience her book, into all parental bonds. The ease and fluidity of the prose here, as she bounces through a lifetime of memories with her father, is nothing short of enthralling. The reader falls in love with her Dad despite many profound shortfalls in his parenting and his judgment.
As a proud Dad who knows he did many things right but suffers the inescapable guilt of each mistake made, I loved this book.
Wonderful Memorial to an Imperfect but Nonetheless Loving Dad
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