My book: The Lion’s Daughter

My lifelong love of adventure – and the fearless mother who showed me the way.

The Lion’s Daughter is the powerful and inspiring memoir of 60-year-old, American-Swedish Kimberly Hampton Nilsson. Her unconventional upbringing and relationship with her mother led her to travel the globe to seek her fullest and most fearless life. Tender, moving, and uplifting, The Lion’s Daughter shows us all that when we dare to go beyond our comfort zone, each of us can find that courage inside to live our most authentic lives.

From an early age, Kimberly’s mother, Renee, rejected the rules of home, marriage, and security, uprooting her two young daughters into a bohemian existence that took them from the beaches of Miami to the mountains of Colorado and to a vision of life as the ultimate creative adventure. Through her unusual childhood, Kimberly learnt discipline and self-reliance out of necessity, carving out her own values in a family where love was abundant and freedom came first.

Hitchhiking to Guatemala at 16 with her first love, travel — not tourism — quickly becomes her lifelong obsession. From becoming an elite skier and sailing across the seas to Egypt and the Holy Land to living with a rural family in Nepal, serving with the Peace Corps in Guatemala, and hearing the call of the lions on the Serengeti, Kimberly discovers in travel a real lust for life.

All through her life, and even in the hardest of circumstances when her mother gets terminal cancer and chooses to end her life legally in New Mexico, Kimberly always demonstrates the courage she learned from her mother: the courage to decide, to change and to move out of her comfort zone. The Lion’s Daughter shows us all what it means to be fully alive, and that the beast of fear must be tamed, or life itself will eat you up.