Cat Flap

by Alan S. Cowell

'When she awoke as a cat, Dolores Tremayne saw no immediate advantage in having four paws instead of two arms and two legs.'

While business executive Dolores Tremayne flies to Germany for a conference, some part of her wakes up in her London home, inside her house cat, X.

Through the eyes of the mischievous X, Dolores witnesses all sorts of goings-on in her household that she’s not been aware of. What is the upstairs neighbour doing here? Who is her daughter talking to on the internet?

And with her reprobate husband ‘conveniently’ leaving the cat flap open for their indoor cat, Dolores isn’t even sure if X and she will be around to help. The more Dolores sees with X, the more desperate she becomes to take action, until finally she must find a way to intervene before she loses everything.

Hilarious and unforgettable, Cat Flap is a charming satire by The New York Times journalist Alan Cowell that takes readers on an odyssey of modern love in modern life.

Paperback

Published August 26, 2021

About the author

ALAN S. COWELL is a British writer whose career spanned four decades as a foreign correspondent, first for Reuters and then for The New York Times. Alongside news coverage, he authored works of fiction and non-fiction, including The Terminal Spy, a definitive account of the life and death of Alexander V. Litvinenko, a former KGB officer poisoned with radioactive polonium in London in 2006. His novels include Permanent Removal, set in post-apartheid South Africa. Cowell is married and lives in London.

Reviews

[Maria Beltrami · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love cats very much, but I never imagined waking up one morning and seeing the world through the eyes of a cat, which is what happens to the protagonist of this book. While her body is in the middle of a business trip, part of Dolores' consciousness finds itself in the body of the family cat, with all the limitations, but also the advantages. She discovers many things she would never have suspected, such as the duplicity of her handsome husband and the dangers faced by her teenage daughters. The human Dolores remains completely unaware of the events, and meanwhile the feline Dolores tries with all her might to overcome the limits of her animal instinct, using it to her own advantage, despite the fact that the family cat is, to all intents and purposes, an indoor cat.
In a crescendo of increasingly frenetic and humorously described events, the human Dolores and the feline Dolores converge with growing determination to avert a tragedy, and at the same time, to come to terms with the past and the present. Like the calm after the storm, the lockdown due to COVID suggests a time of quiet to get back to making sense of things.
Hilariously funny, this book is, liguistically speaking, one of the richest I have come across from an English-speaking writer.