There is no Year of the Cat on the Chinese Zodiac, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett tells us, because (legend has it), “the cat slept through the meeting between the emperor and the animals and arrived too late to be assigned to the calendar”. No one who is familiar with cats will be surprised by this.
This is a book about cats: famous cats, religious cats, cats in mythology, the cats of artists and authors, and, naturally, Cosslett’s own cat Mackerel, adopted as a kitten in the spring of 2020. It is also a book about lockdown – the pain, grief, terror and occasional unexpected joy of those pandemic months. It is about Cosslett herself: her childhood in Wales caring for her autistic brother, her time in Paris, and the traumas that she acknowledges have shaped her life. And it is a book about motherhood, or rather, the complex, knotted, contradictory concept of motherhood as seen through the eyes of a woman in her early thirties desperately trying to work out what she wants.
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