Five Books Featuring Cats I’ve Read

I’ve taken to including warnings/reassurances in my reviews of novels when dogs appear. So many meet miserable fates but cats tend to fare better. Below are five novels cat lovers can read safe in the knowledge that no horrible fate will be dealt to our furry friend, although some might beg to differ about the first one.

Patrick deWitt’s French Exit is a caustic caricature of the wealthy upper classes, taking its readers from New York City to Paris in the company of Frances Price, her son Malcolm and Small Frank, their ancient cat. After years of jaw dropping extravagance Frances’s husband’s money has finally run out. She sells the contents of her swanky apartment, then the apartment itself, stashing 185,000 euros in cash along with her sedated cat in her handbag and crosses the Atlantic with Malcolm in tow. Once established, Frances sets about ridding herself of her cash but not before Small Frank runs away leaving her distraught and desperate to find him. He is, after all, the vessel that houses her dead husband’s spirit. With its cast of vividly memorable characters, not least Small Frank, DeWitt’s satire is almost cartoon-like in its outlandish comedy.

Cats abound in Japanese fiction and have done for centuries. One such appears in Takashi Hiraide’s The Guest Cat narrated by a man who lives with his wife in the grounds of a large house with a rambling garden. In their mid-thirties and childless, they both work at home leading a quiet life, occasionally seeing friends and helping out their landlady. Shy and a little skittish at first, a cat begins to visit them. Once sure of her welcome, Chibi, as they call her, begins to come and go as she pleases but when their ageing landlady tells them she plans to sell the house, they know they must move and will no longer see the cat who has become so dear to them. A thoughtful rather lovely novella, elegantly understated and full of quiet insights into the couple’s life.

Set in Tokyo, Nick Bradley’s episodic, cleverly constructed The Cat and the City follows a set of characters through the teeming capital as it prepares to host the Olympics, each of whose lives are touched by a very particular cat: a stray apparently just passing through. It’s not clear, at first, how they all relate to each other which had me wondering if the whole thing would hold together but patience pays off as Bradley’s novel reveals itself to be an elaborate and satisfying jigsaw. The cat flits in and out of each of their stories, even making an appearance in the manga which a young boy draws for the agoraphobic man he befriends, brought together by its injury. It’s feline of very unusual qualities but this is a spoiler-free zone so you’ll have to read Bradley’s novel to find out what they are.

Malachy Tallack’s That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz is about a man who’s spent almost his entire life in one place who finds an unexpected friendship through a kitten, left on his doorstep in a cardboard box, he decides to call Loretta. Jack was born two years after his parents married. His father brought a passion for music back from his whaling days in South Georgia, passing it on to his son who became an ardent country music fan. Now in his sixties, he’s a man of simple routine with many acquaintances who have never quite become friends. Loretta is a tiny thing but she’s the spark for a surprising change in Jack’s life. Tallack is a close observer, not least of cat behaviour: Loretta is as lovingly drawn as Jack, and eight-year-old Vaila’s adoration of her is spot on. I thoroughly enjoyed this touching novel which steers well clear of sentimentality.

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s Harmless Like You features a most unusual cat, one I’m not sure I could love. After his Canadian father dies en route to meet his new granddaughter, Jay finds that the family home in Connecticut has been bequeathed to Yuki, his Japanese mother who left when he was two years old. As the executor of his father’s will, Jay must hand over the deed in person. Beginning in 1968 when Yuki was sixteen, Buchanan’s novel tells the story of how a mother came to do the unthinkable and leave her infant son. Yuki’s story is interspersed with Jay’s, bereft of the father he had hoped would teach him how to parent his own baby daughter and filled with resentment at his mother who he manages to track down to Berlin, accompanied by Celeste, his elderly, hairless therapy cat. The book’s poignancy is leavened with a wry humour, occasionally downright comic: the image of Celeste all done up in her ‘festive sweater’ has certainly stayed with me.

If you’d like to become acquainted with more fictional felines, Mallika’s annual Reading the Meow feature over at Literary Potpourri is well worth investigating.

Any novels about cats you’d particularly recommend?

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