Phone orders min p&p of £1.The international phenomenon that has sold more than two million copies, If Cats Disappeared from the World is a heartwarming, funny, and profound meditation on the meaning of life.
Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. To order If Cats Disappeared from the World for £7.73, Always Another Country for £8.99, or Enigma Variations for £11.17, go to or call 03. An intense book that reaches beyond the narrator’s self-regard to ask some big questions about sexual desire. Aciman, who wrote Call Me By Your Name, is particularly strong at channelling the ache of infatuation through Paul, with a vivid chapter on Manfred, the man with the beautiful body from the shower room of Paul’s tennis club. Subsequent chapters reveal adult relationships with both women and men. The first captures boyhood yearning as Paul falls for Giovanni, a man much older than himself while on holiday with his parents (“I worship this man”). The link is the American narrator, Paul, who travels from boyhood to marriage and beyond, charting his amorous inner life, his sexual obsessions, conquests and heartbreaks via five memorable figures. This novel’s five chapters are set out like the musical movements suggested in its title. The book grows in scope – and power – when Msimang’s family return to South Africa, and she describes the complex racial dynamics of this new nation, from “white righteousness” (there is an angry exchange with a white woman in a supermarket who spits out angry words in Afrikaans at Msimang) to a generation of black elites who are not “interested in the stories of the poor”. This is at once a story of family life and a record of political awakening – confronting a racist waitress in a South African cafe, watching Spike Lee’s film Malcolm X, and voting, momentously, for Nelson Mandela in 1994. Msimang was born in the 70s and experienced an itinerant childhood in exile, living in Zambia, Kenya and Canada, before returning home. Sisonke Msimang’s father left South Africa in 1962 to join the ANC’s “illegal army” against apartheid. Kawamura’s message is clear without being didactic: look around you, embrace those you love and enjoy life while you can. A warm, quirky novel that has sold more than a million copies in Japan, it reflects on life, love, family estrangement and what remains when we are gone with levity and a surprising emotional charge. He accepts the bargain, sacrificing phones, films, clocks – but he draws the line at his beloved cat, Cabbage.
That is, until the devil appears, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, and offers him a trade-off: he will be given an extra day of life if he chooses one thing to eliminate from the world. The narrator of this book has a grade four brain tumour, we are told, and only has days to live.
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