The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa, translated by Louise Heal Kawai
When his Grandfather dies, the studious, somewhat introverted, high school student, Rintaro Natsuki, inherits his second-hand bookshop. He has almost decided to sell it when a verbose ginger cat named Tiger appears in the shop with the strangest request. The cat needs Rintaro’s help to save books that have been imprisoned, are being destroyed or are languishing, unloved.
After his initial surprise, Rintaro agrees to help Tiger to rescue the mistreated books and set them free. To do this they must embark on treacherous journeys through divergent labyrinths to achieve their goal.
During these travels to the unknown, the adventurers meet a man who locks books away in an enormous building, a merciless book torturer who cuts the pages of books into brief extracts to allow people speed read, and a publisher whose mindset is to sell books as disposable products.
Will this intrepid, odd couple survive and triumph?
However, there is another mission that Rintaro must complete alone!
This is a magical, captivating story, not only of a fierce, protective love of books but of the breaking down of reserves to find friendship, loyalty and love.
Furthermore, it is a novel of outstanding importance for those of us whose love of books extends beyond their printed pages.
A beautiful, memorable, and exquisitely written must-read for 2021!
ISBN: 9781529052107
The Cat Who Saved Books is available in paperback and hardback.
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
About the Authors
Sosuke Natsukawa is a Japanese physician and novelist, born in Osaka Prefecture in 1978. He graduated from the Shinshu University Medical School and practices medicine at a hospital in the largely rural prefecture of Nagano. His multi-volume debut novel, Kamisama no Karute, published in 2009, won several prizes and sold over three million copies in Japan. The Cat Who Saved Books is set to be translated into over twenty languages around the world.
Louise Heal Kawai comes from Manchester in the UK. With the exception of a short detour to Fort Worth, Texas, she has spent the past twenty years in Nagoya, Japan, as a translator and teacher. Her published translations include Daido Tamaki’s Milk, which appeared in the short story anthology Inside and Other Short Fiction; Tendo Shoko’s best-selling autobiographyYakuza Moon; and most recently Building Waves, a novel by feminist writer and poet Tomioka Taeko. She had a lot of fun translating Breasts and Eggs into Northern English dialect and is currently searching for other interesting literature from the Osaka/Kansai region of Japan.
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