The Year of the Cat

Critics Review

• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is simply one of the best writers working today. She conjures a heady, terrifying time in beautiful detail. Here’s to family, to glamour, and to love

  Nell Frizzell, author of The Panic Years

• Acutely evocative… Ripples with those rare nuggets of wisdom that feel as though their author has reached into your head and pulled out something you have been on the verge of saying all your life.

  'I Newspaper

• What Cosslett so beautifully captures is that liminal period before any life-changing decision, when anguished uncertainty morphs into sudden resolve.

  New Statesman

• The most beautiful paragraphs in The Year of the Cat remind me what a rare gift Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett possesses: expansive compassion, empathy and warmth, but a scalpel precision with words. Memories are conjured so headily it feels, to the reader, less like reading than experiencing déjà vu

  Emma Forrest, author of Busy Being Free

• A nuanced calibration of care, desire, trauma and anxiety that made me feel so energised. A superbly written, special book

  Olivia Sudjic, author of Asylum Road

• Such a moving, unique and elegant book, examining mental health, motherhood, creativity, love, life, youth, femininity, family and friendship. But above all, Cosslett takes her place in a long history of genius writers in the meowmoir genre by celebrating her strong bond with a true hero — Mackerel the cat. I loved this book, and if you have a heart, you will, too.

  Nick Bradley, author of The Cat and the City

• The Year of the Cat is a tender and wise meditation on trauma and the fragmentation of memory. Weaving together a history of women and their feline companions, Cosslett charts the emergence of a lasting love, while grappling with deeper anxieties: what it means to be a carer, and a mother, in precarious times. With her signature wit and radiant prose, Cosslett has produced a remarkable work, one that speaks for her generation

  Jessica Cornwell, author of Birth Notes

• I feel like I have been waiting my whole life for this brilliant book, alive with Rhiannon’s characteristic blend of gorgeous prose, razor-sharp analysis and enormous amounts of empathy and honesty. You’ll come back to it again and again, as I have

  Lucia Osborne-Crowley, author of I Choose Elena

• Sharp and accurate…a brave process of healing and self reconstruction

  Observer

• Admirable and affecting

  Guardian

• A meditative read on what it means not just to be a mother, but a human being just trying to navigate all that life throws at us

  Red Online

• I loved it. Such a strong, nuanced book; Rhiannon’s writing is as sharp as her thinking. It’s funny, human, rich with thought and care

  Rebecca Watson

• At once thoughtful and thought-provoking. There are more and more books on the experiences of motherhood, but few make room for what Cosslett describes as ‘not motherhood, or almost motherhood’… Here she is changing the game, finding a new way of writing it

  Times Literary Supplement