The Year of the Cat

I looked around at my flat, at the woodchip wallpaper and scuffed furniture, and realised that I did have a life after all. What it didn't have in it was a cat.

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett grew up in rural Wales with a severely autistic brother and a single mother who did everything she could to give her children a truly magical childhood. At the heart of what made their chaotic, loving house a home were a succession of extraordinary cats.

In her thirties, Rhiannon and the man who would become her husband, make a rented home for themselves, with a succession of lodgers, while they try to save for a more stable future. Thoughts of a baby are never far from her mind, but after a childhood as her brother's carer, does she want to devote her adult life to such a traditional, female role, especially when she has so many books to write? And can she be sure she will ever be free of the PTSD from which she has suffered since she was attacked in a London street in her twenties, and was lucky to escape alive?

Moving from winter to spring over the course of a long, locked-down year, this nimble and gorgeously written memoir charts the way a small cat called Mackerel changed everything about Rhiannon's life, taught her to face down her fears, and to appreciate quite how much love she had to offer.