To Be a Cat - Hardcover

Matt Haig was born in Sheffield in 1975 and grew up in Nottinghamshire. He has lived in London and Ibiza. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Sunday Times, Independent, Sydney Morning Herald and the Face. His first novel for children, Shadow Forest, won the Gold Smarties Award. Matt has also written several novels for adults.

To Be a Cat 1.

A Secret

Here is a secret I shouldn’t really tell you, but I will because I just can’t help it. It’s too big. Too good. Okay, sit down, get ready, brace yourself, have some emergency chocolate handy. Squeeze a big cushion. Here it is:

Cats are magic.

That’s right.

Cats. They’re magic.

They have powers you and I can only dream of having.

But even as I tell you this I can see what you are thinking. You’re thinking, No, they don’t, cats are just cute little pets who sleep next to radiators all day long.

To which I would say—that’s just what they want you to think. And now you’re thinking, These are just words in a story written by some author with a boring name, and all authors aren’t to be trusted one bit, because they tell lies for a living.

And you’re a little bit right.

But stories aren’t always lies. They are things stored in all our imaginations—hence the name stories—and it is the author’s job to point them out. And some of the things we imagine are more true than the facts we learn in math, it’s just a different kind of truth to 76 - 15 = 61.

So yes, every cat who ever prowled the earth is capable of doing some very special things. Such as:

1. The ability to understand a thousand different animal languages (including gerbil, antelope, and the ridiculously complicated goldfish).

2. Fence-balancing.

3. The capability of napping anywhere—laps, kitchen floors, on top of TVs when the theme song to the news is blaring at full volume.

4. Smelling sardines from two miles away.

5. Purring. (Trust me, that is magic.)

6. The ability, via their whiskers, to sense approaching dogs.

7. *****-******* ***-*** *************.

Let’s stop here, at number seven. Okay, one to six seem quite ordinary. You might know cats do some of these things, even if you’ve never understood it as magic before. But if you see magic often enough it starts to look normal. And don’t get me wrong, this is by no means the end of the list. Indeed, the list is so long that it would fill ten whole books the size of this one, and your eyes would be bleeding by the time you got to 9,080,652: “radiator radar.”

But number seven is a good place to stop. This seventh power is the most important one, at least for the tale I am about to tell you. (Although, if you want to read a book about radiator-detecting felines, I highly recommend A. B. Crumb’s exceptional Warmpaws, which is by far the best of its type.)

Also, you might be wondering what *****-******* ***-*** ************* actually is. Well, we’ll get to that. Don’t be too greedy. Though you can’t have enough secrets in one chapter, you know. Not usually. But the truth is number seven is quite a big deal. I had to put asterisks instead of the actual letters because I’ve got to be careful how I tell you this. If I just came out with it right now, you’d either not believe me, or you’d have too much understanding all at once and you wouldn’t understand the hidden dangers.

So don’t worry, I’ll tell you about it in good time. What I will say is that those humans who get to experience it, come to understand its terrible and often deadly effects and certainly never look at a cat in the same way again. One of those poor souls was an unfortunate boy called Barney Willow, and he’s waiting for you on the very next page.