The Lion; by Joseph Kessel.

A story that has to be lived to be believed unless one is slightly familiar with the concept that life can be very different from what one expects as normal in one's own surroundings, since what one calls normal and what one expects is conditioned by one's own life.

A young girl that cuddles with a full grown lion, not one without claws or teeth but a natural friend of this girl for reasons they know best, and naturally make others around rather uncomfortable, is the central theme in this story set in Africa. Combine that with the local custom of a young male needing to prove his arrival at manhood by killing a lion in combat without modern weapons, practically wrestling with the lion, and some jealousy between various males centred on the girl - not of African ancestry, incidentally, but of Europeans stock, settler colonisers - and one has the picture of the complex, volatile story. Who survives, who does not, is what one needs to read the book to discover, apart from other virtues of the book such as mesmerising descriptions of Africa.