“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
“The best book I’ve read for a very long time. . . . It’s by a writer called Neige Sinno and it completely changes all the rules of writing.”
—Rachel Cusk, speaking to the Stockholm Libraries PLAY
“[An] achingly vivid, cerebral memoir of her abuse and its long aftermath…… 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, New York Times
“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
“Sad Tiger is an impressive accomplishment, as much a memoir as it is literary scholarship. This is a smart interrogation of the self and of abuse that expands beyond Sinno’s life to major literary figures — like Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, and Vladimir Nabokov — who have also reckoned with these ideas in their work.”
—Isle McElroy, VULTURE‘s Best Books of 2025
“A truly extraordinary book about childhood trauma and its legacies – intellectual, physical, familial, emotional. But moreover, perhaps, and most powerfully, it is a book about how and why we speak or stay silent, tell and remake stories, use particular words that may or may not be enough, and turn to literature and culture to learn how to narrate, and understand, our own lives anew. Wise, true, profound and generous”
—Emily La Barge, The Nerve‘s Best Books of 2025
“They are stories that disempower perpetrators, explore a kind of cultural justice that goes beyond the ability of courts to punish, and model how affected families might reconfigure in a post-trauma reality. This is, it seems, knowledge that could, perhaps, lead to change.”
—Lori O’Dea, Liber
“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
“Sad Tiger is not what you’d expect from a memoir about sexual abuse and trauma. Unlike Vanessa Springora’s 2020 international bestseller Consent, say, which was also translated by Natasha Lehrer, Sad Tiger, its title an allusion to the William Blake poem, is not a taut narrative of devastation and reclamation. At times Sinno writes with the essayistic force of Virginie Despentes’s King Kong Theory, at others with the vividness of Édouard Louis’s novels. She shares Annie Ernaux’s will to self- excavation and proclivity for experimentation. Sinno refuses to be hamstrung by genre, choosing a balletic approach, as if only a choreographed dance around her subject, again and again, will properly encapsulate its blast radius.”
—Elias Altman, Bookforum
“This hard-to-classify work is a hybrid thing: part memoir, part cultural criticism. Sinno’s devastating subject is her rapist, and the sexual abuse that ruined her childhood. Such material would be hard to handle in any container, but Sinno’s project is especially profound (and novel) for its clear-eyed aims. At top of book, she announces a wish to understand her predator. In two meaty, devastating halves (“Portraits” and “Ghosts”) she invokes work by Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Antonin Artaud and other thinkers in attempt to understand incest as an anthropological, psychological, and interpersonal phenomenon. The result is a brilliant, generous, vulnerable act of imagination.” —Brittany Allen, LitHub
“In this award-winning translated memoir, Neige Sinno reveals sexual abuse by her stepfather in intense yet reflective candor. Even more so, it’s a heartwrenching exploration of memory, agency and how we use literature to make sense of child abuse, shame and silence.”
—Karla J. Strand, Ms. magazine
“Throw yourself into the most extraordinary book of the literary season, Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno….Exceptionally intelligent and truthful, Sad Tiger is a must-read.”
—Elle (France)
“Sinno multiplies her points of view so as not to be left alone in the face of catastrophe.”
—Liberation
“A powerful, reflective and meditative work, impressive in its depth and mastery.”
—Télérama
“A book of striking intelligence and beauty.’”
—Transfuge
“Neige Sinno has miraculously found the right tone to give this book its unique emotion, violent and delicate at the same time, human, all too human. And a rare truthfulness too.”
—Le Point
“A total literary gesture, violent, humble, sensitive and of astounding intelligence. This book needs many, many readers.”
—L’Obs
“Yet in taking their own experiences of trauma seriously, by directing their writing and reading towards understanding and articulating it, Hood and Sinno expand the horizons of what trauma literature can be. Their books mark the arrival of two major literary talents.”—The Conversation
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