Heart of a lion

Sue Brierley is nervous. Today the final draft of her manuscript goes to the printer and the implications of baring heretofore very private details of her life are playing on her mind. Sue is the mother of Saroo Brierley, the Indian boy whose story travelled even more widely than he did, first as the bestselling memoir, A Long Way Home, and later as the 2017 motion picture, Lion. In fact it was Saroo who convinced his mother that she too should write a book.

“My son came up with this idea,” she explains. “I really wouldn’t have undertaken it otherwise … I’ve always kept my cards very close to my chest. So, until they read this book, a lot of people in my life will have had no idea about my story.”

Even people who know her well?

“Yes,” Sue admits. “It’s going to be traumatic. I’ll feel deceitful in some ways, but it was too hard to talk about.”

Her son Saroo’s odyssey was heart-wrenching. At five years old, while out adventuring, he fell asleep on a train which travelled the breadth of India to the seething city of Kolkata. There, Saroo lived by his wits, sleeping under bridges and on railway platforms, until fate delivered him to an orphanage. Attempts were made to find his family but Saroo was young and could not pronounce the name of his village. His family was but a speck in a population of close to a billion people, so he was declared an orphan. Fortuitously, he was adopted by Sue (played by Nicole Kidman in the film ) and John Brierley (played by David Wenham) and grew up in their neat suburban home in Hobart, Tasmania, before tenacity and modern technology helped him to find his way home.