Cat and the City

In the sprawl of Tokyo, a calico cat moves through the back streets, brushing against the lives of the people it meets and quietly stitching them together. Through the cat's wanderings, Nick Bradley's debut assembles a mosaic of interlinked stories—a homeless former alcoholic named Ichiro who befriends the cat, his lonely taxi-driver brother Taro, Taro's daughter Ryoko who has fled to New York, a convenience-store clerk looking for love, a reclusive hermit—whose paths cross in unexpected ways.

Formally playful and slyly political, The Cat and the City folds in manga panels, footnotes, haiku, and social-media fragments, moving between romance, detective story, science fiction, and gothic horror. It's a warm, melancholy, inventive novel about the yearning to belong and the need to escape in one of the world's largest cities.