Top Ten Tuesday is a listicle created by That Artsy Reader Girl. It was created from a love of lists, books and creating bookish friends. Each Tuesday she assigns a new topic for others to join in with. Here is where you can learn more information about Top Ten Tuesday. Ad/Affiliate – Some of these books have affiliate links, you can read my disclaimer here.
This week’s Top Ten Tuesday prompt is 10 book titles that include “(insert word of your choice)”. I originally was thinking about the word “butterfly”, but I couldn’t find that many books that I wanted to include. Instead, I have chosen cat-themed books, as I am currently missing my two cats at home. Who wouldn’t want to curl up with some cosy cat-themed books! I found 15 cat books on my TBR and have managed to narrow it down to 10.
1. She and Her Cat by Makoto Shinkai and Naruki Nagakawa, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori
StoryGraph synopsis:
This is the story of Miyu, a woman who lives alone with her cat, Chobi. As Miyu navigates the world of adulthood, she discovers both the freedom and loneliness that come with living independently, and Chobi learns of the outside world through her actions. Time drifts slowly for Miyu and her cat, but the harsh realities of the world soon catch up…
2. Great Writers and the Cats Who Owned Them by Susannah Fullerton
StoryGraph synopsis:
Throughout history, cats and writers have bonded together in a magical combination of comfort, companionship and inspiration.
The famous authors featured here range from Samuel Johnson, whose cat Hodge dined on oysters, and Edward Lear, whose charismatic cat Foss was missing half his tail, to Margaret Mitchell, L.M. Montgomery and Dorothy L. Sayers, who rescued her kitten Blitz from a bombsite. Each chapter delves into the relationship between authors and the felines who condescended to share their homes and desks, revealing intriguing aspects of our much-loved writers’ lives and celebrating the ways in which cats – pure-bred and moggy, large and small, graceful and eccentric – enriched the world of literature.
Including fun additional features on cats in bookshops, libraries and hotels, and illustrated with charming line drawings, this is a perfect gift for cat-lovers everywhere.
3. The Cat Share by Angela Jariwala
StoryGraph synopsis:
Ben is a firefighter and, if he’s honest, he’s finding life hard. The arrival of a small tabby cat, who Ben decides to call Fred, helps him feel less isolated. But then, one day, Fred appears with a note tied to his collar from someone called Jeanie, accusing Ben of stealing her cat! Jini lives alone with her cat Oscar – yes, she’s single, but after breaking up with her boyfriend, she’s more than content to be living alone. Sometimes she worries she might be playing things too safe, but she’s had enough of taking risks. As the two near neighbours start corresponding via the cat, their notes to each other reveal the truths they are hiding from even their closest friends and themselves. Sometimes it’s as simple as meeting the boy next door.
4. Kittens and Kisses at the Cat Cafe by Kris Bock
StoryGraph synopsis:
Adam has loved Marley since he was 13, and she was his best friend’s free-spirited older sister. Back then, he fantasised about rescuing her from bandits or dragons. Now he’s 24, and the five-year age gap isn’t so serious. He wants nothing more than to become a family with Marley and her son. But will she ever see him as a man?
Marley is a baker at the new Furrever Friends Cat Café, which is still trying to find its footing. Her nine-year-old son, Brian, desperately wants a kitten, but they can’t have pets where they live. Who has the time to date? Just as well that she’s protected her heart since the father of her child disappeared.
When someone leaves a box of week-old kittens at the café, Adam jumps at the chance to be a hero. But herding kittens might be tougher than fighting dragons, especially when two of them fail to thrive. Can Adam, Marley, and Brian save the kittens and find a future together?
He’s loved her forever. She still sees him as the neighbour‘s kid. Can five desperate kittens bring them together?
5. A Cat Cafe Christmas
StoryGraph synopsis:
Veterinarian and animal lover Kara Ingalls needs a Christmas miracle. Opening the Meow and Furrever Cat Café to find loving homes for adorable, adoptable cats was a dream come true–but with more cats than customers, it’s quickly turning into a nightmare. If Kara can’t figure out some way to get the café out of the red, it won’t last past the holidays.
Marketing guru Ben Reese may be annoyingly smart and frustratingly bossy, but when he hatches a plan to put the café in the “green” by Christmas, Kara realises that she’d be a fool to turn down his help. And so what if he turns out to be an excellent problem solver and nerdy-hot–he can’t even handle fostering one little kitten. She needs to keep their relationship professional and focus on saving the cafe.
But if Ben and Kara can set aside their differences–and find homes for all the cats by Christmas–they might discover that, by risking their hearts, they’ll have their own purr-fect holiday…together.
Continue reading: 10 cosy cat-themed books – Top Ten Tuesday
6. The Nine Lives of a Bookshop Cat by Kentaro Utsugi, translated by Sylvia Gallagher
StoryGraph synopsis:
In his third life, Kinnosuke belonged to a famous author.
Now, in his ninth, he wants nothing more to do with humans, who bring nothing but trouble and suffering. Drawn to the city in search of food, he comes across the Hokuto-do Bookshop, owned by a curious woman who has already given a home to four contented cats.
Soon, Kinnosuke begins to notice the shop’s quirks: there are few customers, but it never goes out of business. No stock is ordered, but it never runs out of books. And the other cats also belonged to famous authors in previous lives. If he wants to know more of its secrets, he will have to reveal his own about the life he shared with the author.
At first, he is reluctant, but when a young aspiring writer faces tragedy, Kinnosuke is drawn into her struggle, confronting the bookshop’s hidden past to help keep her dream alive.
Bookshop* | World of Books
7. The Cat and the City by Nick Bradley
StoryGraph synopsis:
In Tokyo–one of the world’s largest megacities–a stray cat is wending her way through the back alleys. And, with each detour, she brushes up against the seemingly disparate lives of the city-dwellers, connecting them in unexpected ways. But the city is changing. As it does, it pushes her to the margins where she chances upon a series of apparent strangers–from a homeless man squatting in an abandoned hotel, to a shut-in hermit afraid to leave his house, to a convenience store worker searching for love. The cat orbits Tokyo’s denizens, drawing them ever closer. In a series of spellbinding, interlocking narratives–with styles ranging from manga to footnotes–Nick Bradley has hewn a novel of interplay and estrangement; of survival and self-destruction; of the desire to belong and the need to escape. Formally inventive and slyly political, The Cat and The City is a lithe thrill-ride through the less-glimpsed streets of Tokyo.
8. The Blanket Cats by Kiyoshi Shigematsu
StoryGraph synopsis:
Is three days with a cat enough to change your life?
The troubled and anxious of Tokyo are desperate to find out. They all have their problems – and they all want to believe that a feline companion from a unique pet shop can help them find a solution. But there are rules: they must be returned after three days, and they must always sleep in their own familiar blankets.
In The Blanket Cats, we meet seven such customers, including a couple struggling with infertility, a middle-aged woman on the run from the police, and two families in very different circumstances simply seeking joy.
But like all their kind, the blanket cats are mysterious creatures with their own unknowable agendas, who delight in confounding expectations. And perhaps what their hosts are looking for isn’t what they really need.
Three days may not be enough to change your life. But it might be enough to change how you see it.
9. Cat Stories by Diana Secker Tesdell
StoryGraph synopsis:
Two centuries of literary homages to the fascinating feline: stories by writers of every stripe–from P.G. Wodehouse to Doris Lessing, from Damon Runyon to Steven Millhauser.
The essential unknowableness of cats has inspired many flights of fancy: Italo Calvino’s secret city of cats in “The Garden of Stubborn Cats,” the disappearing feline in Ursula K. Le Guin’s mind-twisting “Schrödinger’s Cat,” the cartoon rodent and his cartoon nemesis in Steven Millhauser’s “Cat ‘n’ Mouse.” Cats flaunt their superiority in Angela Carter’s bawdy retelling of “Puss-in-Boots” and in Stephen Vincent Benét’s “The King of the Cats,” in which two impossibly suave foreigners are revealed as even more exotic than they pretend to be. In “The Islands” by Alice Adams and “I See You, Bianca” by Maeve Brennan we see how much cats can mean to their humans. And the inimitable Saki lets us hear what cats really think of us in “Tobermory,” his tale of a tactless talking animal.
In these and other stories, this delightful book offers cat lovers a many- faceted tribute to the beguilingly mysterious objects of their affection.
10. We’ll Prescribe You a Cat by Syou Ishida, translated by E. Maddison Shimoda
StoryGraph synopsis:
A cat a day keeps the doctor away…
Tucked away in an old building at the end of a narrow alley in Kyoto, the Kokoro Clinic for the Soul can only be found by people who are struggling in their lives and genuinely need help. The mysterious clinic offers a unique treatment to those who find their way there: it prescribes cats as medication. Patients are often puzzled by this unconventional prescription, but when they “take” their cat for the recommended duration, they witness profound transformations in their lives, guided by the playful, empathetic, occasionally challenging yet endearing cats.
Throughout the pages, the power of the human-animal bond is revealed as a disheartened businessman finds unexpected joy in physical labor, a young girl navigates the complexities of elementary school cliques, a middle-aged man struggles to stay relevant at work and home, a hardened bag designer seeks emotional balance, and a geisha finds herself unable to move on from the memory of her lost cat. As the clinic’s patients navigate their inner turmoil and seek resolution, their feline companions lead them toward healing, self-discovery, and newfound hope.
Have you read any of these cosy cat-themed books?
Caroline ♡
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