The best books with cats as characters

The original, and still unsurpassed! First published in Japan in 1906, this gleeful skewering of the foibles of Japan’s upper-middle-class during the Meiji era—told in first-person narration from the perspective of an eminently observant and sardonic housecat—manages to feel fresh and modern more than 100 years later and reads like something that could have been published last week. When I first set about writing my own novel from a cat’s perspective, Love Saves the Day, this was the first book I turned to for inspiration. It was so good, it almost left me too intimidated to write mine. Almost.

This satirical Russian novel, completed in 1940 but not published until 1967—in Paris, due to Communist censorship—was something of a revelation for me when I first read it in my early twenties; having thus far only been exposed to Dostoevsky and Chekhov, I’d had no idea that a Russian novel could be so funny! Chief among The Master and Margarita’s comic delights (from this cat lover’s perspective, anyway) is the character of Behemoth—a preternaturally large and possibly demonic black cat who walks on his hind legs and speaks fluent Russian, and who excels at the quintessential Russian pastimes of chess and vodka. He’s also an adept at joke telling—which makes perfect sense, given that cats are nature’s comedians. An unforgettable cat in a hilarious, unforgettable book!

Not only is the Mrs. Murphy cozy mystery series written from the point of view of a sleuthing cat, it’s actually (allegedly!) written by a cat—the feline in question being Sneaky Pie Brown, author Rita Mae Brown’s real-life tabby companion, who supposedly makes use of Ms. Brown’s typewriter on the sly. Wish You Were Here is the first in a delightfully long series of cozy mysteries set in the fictional small town of Crozet, Virginia—where murders seem to happen with startling regularity, and where postmistress Mary Minor “Harry” Haristeen’s beloved cat, Mrs. Murphy, always seems to be one step ahead of the official investigators. I fell hard for the acerbic, no-nonsense Mrs. Murphy and for this series, which was a direct inspiration for my own “Homer Whodunit” mystery series. 

The iconic 1961 film, starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard, diverges from Truman Capote’s 1958 novella in many of its particulars. But in both versions, Holly Golightly’s chosen companion is a nameless stray cat—simply called Cat—who follows her home one day and ends up carrying an awful lot of symbolic freight for such a small critter: freedom, isolation, rootlessness, and big-picture questions as to whether anyone can truly be beyond the basic need to love and be loved. To me, however, Cat is first and foremost a cat—one of the very great cats in one of the post-war era’s very great works of literature.

The Cheshire Cat was one of the first literary critters I ever fell in love with as a child, and Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are two books that I continually return to as an adult, certain of finding new delights. My two favorite things when I was young were books and animals, so it’s no surprise that I was enraptured by the Cheshire Cat from the get-go. More than just his cat-ness, however, were his trademark mischievous grin; his ability to appear and disappear at will; the creative liberties he takes with the English language; and his gleeful philosophical absurdities, which nevertheless seemed perfectly logical to me as a small child in a world where adults rarely seemed to make sense.