blog — September 06

Announcing “Sad Tiger” by Neige Sinno (tr. Natasha Lehrer)

Cover Design by Stewart Cauley

Sad Tiger (Triste tigre), the acclaimed multi-award-winning literary sensation by Neige Sinno, has been acquired by Seven Stories Press for publication in English in March 2025. 

Winner of the Prix Femina and the Goncourt des Lycéens in 2023 and the European Strega Prize in 2024, Neige Sinno has created a powerful new literary form.

Annie Ernaux says, “Reading Triste tigre 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. . . it is the most powerful, profound book I’ve ever read about the devastation of one person’s childhood by an adult.” (Nobel Prize winner in Literature 2022, in the New York Times, 11/26/2023)

Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer, will be published in the United States and United Kingdom by Seven Stories Press in March 2025. The book was released by P.O.L. in France in 2023 and was the literary phenomenon of French publishing that year, selling over 300,000 copies and with foreign language rights sold in over twenty countries.

In the book — the title inspired by William Blake’s poem "The Tyger" — Sinno tells how she was repeatedly exposed to sexual violence as a child and describes the consequences this experience has imposed on her adult life, on the way she perceives the world, reality, others, and art. Sad Tiger is a work of literature created by weaving years of trauma with an investigation of the limits of both language and imagination, critically examining texts by Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Christine Angot, Annie Ernaux, and Virginie Despentes among others. In trying to write the unthinkable, Sinno offers the reader the opportunity to explore a realm where our thoughts seldom go. And even if the realm itself is dark, the fact that we can bravely navigate through it with our intelligence intact, creates a remarkable reading experience. 

Since its publication in French, Sad Tiger (Triste tigre) has won over a dozen literary prizes including the Prix Femina, the European Strega Prize, the Prix Médicis, the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, and the US and UK Goncourt Prizes. It was also shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt.

Seven Stories publisher Dan Simon calls Triste Tigre “a shocking, and necessary masterpiece.”

Complete list of prizes to date for the original French edition, Triste Tigre:

Winner of the European Strega Prize, 2024
Winner of the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, 2023
Winner of the Prix Femina, 2023
Winner of the US and UK Goncourt Prize Selection, 2024
Winner of the Le Monde Literary Prize, 2023
Winner of the Inrockuptibles Prize, 2023
Shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt, 2023
Shortlisted for the Prix Medicis , 2023
Shortlisted for the Prix Decembre Prize, 2023
Shortlisted for the Prix Wepler, 2023
Shortlisted for the Prix Flore, 2023
Winner of the Goncourt Prizes in Belgium, Slovakia, India, Turkey, Tunisia, and South Korea, 2023

“[A] forensic exploration of how to speak about the unspeakable and how to define the domain of the unspeakable” —Natasha Lehrer, The Times Literary Supplement

"The most extraordinary book of the literary season . . . Exceptionally intelligent and truthful, Triste tigre is a must-read." —Elle

NEIGE SINNO is a French writer who has studied American literature in the United States and Mexico and has worked as a translator and professor of literature. She is the author of two previous books of fiction, Le Camion and La Vie des rats and a literary essay on reading: Lectores entre líneas: Roberto Bolaño, Ricardo Piglia y Sergio Pitol (winner of the Lya Kostakowsky Hispano-American literary essay prize). Born in France, she has lived in Mexico for the past 20 years. Her 2023 book, Triste tigre, won several of France’s top literary prizes and became the publishing sensation of the year. It will be published by Seven Stories Press, in a translation by Natasha Lehrer, in April 2025.

NATASHA LEHRER is a prizewinning writer and translator. She writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement, the Observer, and The Guardian, among many others, and translated works by Chantal Thomas, Vanessa Springora, Amin Maalouf, Victor Segalen, Robert Desnos, and Georges Bataille. In 2016 she was awarded the Scott Moncrieff prize for Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger. She lives in France.

SAD TIGER
By Neige Sinno
Translated by Natasha Lehrer
$22.95 | Trade paperback original | 288 pp | 5-1/2 x 8-1/4”
March 25, 2025 US
March 27, 2025 SSP-UK
9781644214671

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. Especially teenagers.” —Annie Ernaux

Sad Tiger is built on the facts of a series of devastating events. Neige Sinno was 7 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 extraordinary 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. A striking, shocking, and necessary masterpiece.