Published: 3 November 2020
ISBN: 9780241422199
Imprint: Penguin Classics
Format: Paperback
Pages: 96
RRP: $22.99

Categories:

Natural history

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All My Cats

Bohumill Hrabal

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A gem of a book about the aggravations and great joys of cats from a literary master

In the autumn of 1965, flush with the unexpected success of his first published books, the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal bought a weekend cottage in Kersko, about an hour's drive east of Prague. From then until his death in 1997, he divided his time between Prague and Kersko, where he wrote and tended to a community of cats. Over the years, his relationship with them grew deeper, becoming a measure of the pressures, both private and public, that impinged on his life as a writer.

All My Cats, written in 1983 after a serious car accident, is the chronicle of a cat lover who becomes overwhelmed by his cats and his life and is driven to the brink of madness by the dilemmas his indulgent love for the animals has created.

Published: 3 November 2020
ISBN: 9780241422199
Imprint: Penguin Classics
Format: Paperback
Pages: 96
RRP: $22.99

Categories:

Natural history

Share…

Praise for All My Cats

One of the great prose stylists of the 20th century; the scourge of state censors; the gregarious bar hound and lover of gossip, beer, cats and women
Parul Sehgal

Hrabal, to my mind, is one of the greatest European prose writers
Philip Roth

Hrabal was, for all his eccentricity, a major figure in 20th-century world literature
Jonathan Coe

The very best writer
Milan Kundera

A most sophisticated novelist, with a gusting humor and a hushed tenderness of detail
Julian Barnes

A stunningly revealing, occasionally deranged exploration of self, with cat ownership the frame through which that exploration is presented, by one of postwar Europe's greatest writers
Kevin O'Rourke, Michigan Quarterly Review