Here are 100 books that Mala's Cat fans have personally recommended if you like
Mala's Cat.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I had a succession of cats as a child, and when I was six, I watched one of our cats give birth, and then, within weeks, witnessed one of her kittens die. Very early on, cats helped me understand the life and death cycle. As an adult, a series of extraordinary experiences with a stray cat I cared for taught me something further—how thin the veil between life and death truly is. Perhaps because of these experiences, I have an enormous love and respect for feline wisdom, and a deep belief that cats know things we don't. They have much to teach us, if we're open and willing.
I first saw A Street Cat Named Bob advertised on the side of a London double-decker bus—Bob, an adorable ginger cat, held tight to James Bowen's chest, larger than life.
I bought the book that day and read it immediately. Oh my goodness, what a tale. James owes his life to Bob, who got him through addiction and living rough on the streets of London. I'm a sucker for a happy ending, and the good news is—there is one.
From the author of A Christmas Gift from Bob, the original bestseller and heartwarming story of the life-saving friendship between a man and his streetwise cat
'[Bob] has entranced London like no feline since the days of Dick Whittington.' (Evening Standard)
'A heartwarming tale with a message of hope' (Daily Mail)
'Reminded me how amazing having a cat can be' (Glamour)
* * * * * * * *
The uplifting true story of an unlikely friendship between a man on the streets of Covent Garden and the ginger cat who adopts him and helps him heal his life. Now…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I had a succession of cats as a child, and when I was six, I watched one of our cats give birth, and then, within weeks, witnessed one of her kittens die. Very early on, cats helped me understand the life and death cycle. As an adult, a series of extraordinary experiences with a stray cat I cared for taught me something further—how thin the veil between life and death truly is. Perhaps because of these experiences, I have an enormous love and respect for feline wisdom, and a deep belief that cats know things we don't. They have much to teach us, if we're open and willing.
I have had a personal experience of an adored cat communicating with me telepathically when he was alive, from a liminal state shortly after he died, and then through a clairvoyant many years later. His simple messages transformed my understanding of death and what comes next.
Reading The Amazing Afterlife of Animals was a profound confirmation of those experiences. Unusual, mystical encounters with our animals after death can be deeply alienating—until you discover that many others have felt exactly the same thing. This book gave me that recognition.
#1 Bestseller & Winner of 16 National and International Literary Awards
If you are grieving the loss of your beloved pet the uplifting and insightful stories within these chapters will help you break through your grief so you can begin healing. Included are actual messages from departed animals who share details about what they experienced as their life ended and from beyond the veil of the afterlife.
You will discover how pets feel about dying, euthanasia, cremation, reincarnation and so much more.
Award-winning Animal Communicator and Afterlife Expert, Karen Anderson, reveals tantalizing evidence that our pets communicate with us throughout…
I had a succession of cats as a child, and when I was six, I watched one of our cats give birth, and then, within weeks, witnessed one of her kittens die. Very early on, cats helped me understand the life and death cycle. As an adult, a series of extraordinary experiences with a stray cat I cared for taught me something further—how thin the veil between life and death truly is. Perhaps because of these experiences, I have an enormous love and respect for feline wisdom, and a deep belief that cats know things we don't. They have much to teach us, if we're open and willing.
There's something poetic about Takashi Hiraide's writing—evocative, almost romantic—that I found deeply restful.
And given that I tend to read in bed at night, The Guest Cat became one of those books that I looked forward to settling down with. Hiraide is a Japanese poet, and though The Guest Cat is not poetry, I found the gentle, lyrical nature of the storytelling just beautiful, as is the cover—a Japanese ink drawing of Chibe, the sweet, neighborhood stray cat featured in this novel.
A bestseller in France and winner of Japan's Kiyama Shohei Literary Award, The Guest Cat, by the acclaimed poet Takashi Hiraide, is a subtly moving and exceptionally beautiful novel about the transient nature of life and idiosyncratic but deeply felt ways of living. A couple in their thirties live in a small rented cottage in a quiet part of Tokyo; they work at home, freelance copy-editing; they no longer have very much to say to one another. But one day a cat invites itself into their small kitchen. It leaves, but the next day comes again, and then again and…
This book is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to…
I had a succession of cats as a child, and when I was six, I watched one of our cats give birth, and then, within weeks, witnessed one of her kittens die. Very early on, cats helped me understand the life and death cycle. As an adult, a series of extraordinary experiences with a stray cat I cared for taught me something further—how thin the veil between life and death truly is. Perhaps because of these experiences, I have an enormous love and respect for feline wisdom, and a deep belief that cats know things we don't. They have much to teach us, if we're open and willing.
The cover of Lost Cat is, for me, hard to look at. A one-eyed rescued kitten named Gattino, staring out—I knew immediately it would be an emotional read, and I was right.
Losing Gattino becomes the vehicle through which Mary Gaitskill processes deeper grief: her father's death, and the painful unravelling of a cherished fostering relationship.
I picked this up at a well-timed moment in my own life, when I, too, was working through long-held grief, and I cried quite a bit. Honest, raw, and precise—this is grief writing at its most unguarded.
As a kid I felt the unseen magic in the things around me: it seemed as obvious as breathing, particularly when I was out in nature. These are books that brought me back to that… reminding me that being ‘realistic’ doesn’t mean ignoring what’s unseen. These stories have inspired me so deeply and driven my passion as a writer: which is basically to try to reach out to readers and say, hey, we are surrounded. There is more. This is not all there is.
Shulz’s real biography is both tragic and beautiful: a painter and writer, his life was cut short by the holocaust, but he left behind – among other things – an exquisite bedroom mural it took years to discover, and this masterpiece of a book.
A collection of short stories, it poignantly captures the feelings of his time: the sense of order turning into disorder right under a person’s feet. And yet what I think is most incredible about his writing is how Shulz can take you, in a breath, from reality to unreality – without you ever noticing where the line was crossed.
A novel that blends the real and the fantastic, from "one of the most original imaginations in modern Europe" (Cynthia Ozick)
The Street of Crocodiles in the Polish city of Drogobych is a street of memories and dreams where recollections of Bruno Schulz's uncommon boyhood and of the eerie side of his merchant family's life are evoked in a startling blend of the real and the fantastic. Most memorable - and most chilling - is the portrait of the author's father, a maddened shopkeeper who imports rare birds' eggs to hatch in his attic, who believes tailors' dummies should be…
Reseda, California plays an important part in my novels. I grew up there in a middle-class Jewish family, and we experienced the turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s. My parents got divorced, and my brother and I were raised by our working mom until she became paralyzed by a stroke. I found refuge in writing. I wrote The Remainders in 2016 during a tumultuous time when issues of family conflict, homelessness, and the growing cruelty of society came into focus. Still, I believe decency and compassion will prevail. The books I write and enjoy reading seek to find light in the darkest of circumstances.
I read this powerful graphic novel series when the first collections came out in the 1980s.
It shows the horrors of the Holocaust and the impact it has on the families of the survivors. Maus is best known for depicting Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, but Art’s troubled relationship with his father Vladik and the death of his mother Anja by suicide frame the story.
Maus is my favorite graphic novel series and a must-read for understanding the Holocaust and how it shaped Jewish life since.
The bestselling first installment of the graphic novel acclaimed as “the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust” (Wall Street Journal) and “the first masterpiece in comic book history” (The New Yorker) • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • One of Variety’s “Banned and Challenged Books Everyone Should Read”
A brutally moving work of art—widely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever written—Maus recounts the chilling experiences of the author’s father during the Holocaust, with Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing cats.
Maus is a haunting tale within a tale, weaving the author’s account of his…
Tina Edwards loved her childhood and creating fairy houses, a passion shared with her father, a world-renowned architect. But at nine years old, she found him dead at his desk and is haunted by this memory. Tina's mother abruptly moved away, leaving Tina with feelings of abandonment and suspicion.
I love stories that show humanity persevering, stories that show life is lived through easy times and hard ones too. I like stories where there is something worth celebrating in everyday life. Stories that remind us we’re just human and that isn’t too bad and that no matter what hell we’re going through, there’s something on the other side worth enduring for. I have a passionate love for stories like this. I always seek out stories that give me a similar feeling. When I write, I try to write stories that make others feel like how I do when I come across a similar story.
A memoir written by a holocaust survivor’s experience, as well as that of her family, Martin tells the story of how the war came to their lives and uprooted their daily lives.
I met Martin when she signed my copy of her book, so this one holds a special place for me. The story is told from multiple perspectives, as Martin and her siblings take turns describing the ordeals they went through both inside concentration camps and out.
Heartbreaking and harrowing at times, the story also makes a point to address things that helped Martin’s family smile in spite of it all. Martin’s story reminds us of why we keep going, as well as shows us how her family endured the six long years of the war.
The German army swept into Poland on September 1, 1939, and four days later into Dora Szpringer's home town of Bendzin. To begin their reign of terror, the Nazis burned down Bendzin's beautiful synagogue with some 200 helpless Jews inside. Most Jewish families in Bendzin, and rest of Poland were completely wiped out by the Holocaust. The Szpringers were just an ordinary middle-class family, but through many incredible strokes of luck, or perhaps miracles, all seven of them survived. For an entire Jewish family in Poland to survive the Holocaust is amazing--likely unique. What is more remarkable is how they…
As a child, I held conflicting beliefs. I knew my Jewish grandfather had been murdered by Germans in occupied Yugoslavia, yet I somehow believed the Holocaust had never come to his hometown of Belgrade. The family anecdotes my father passed down, a blend of his early memories and what my grandmother told him, didn’t match what I had heard about Germany, Poland, and Anne Frank in Holland during World War II. That started me on a lifelong journey to learn everything I can about the Holocaust, especially in parts of Europe that have received less attention, and to understand the long-reaching effects of genocide on the survivor’s children and grandchildren.
From the minute Glenn Kurtz found a decaying tape of his parents’ trip to Poland in 1938, I was hooked. I’ve imagined being able to glimpse the world my grandparents inhabited in “the Old Country.” And here it was for Kurtz: some of the only film footage of a Jewish world erased by the Holocaust in the last months before it was gone forever.
I was fascinated to follow along with Kurtz as he becomes a detective working to discover who is in the recorded three minutes, where they are, and what they are doing. But that’s just the beginning; as he discovers the past, he makes connections in the present and changes lives in the process.
Traveling in Europe in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of World War II, David Kurtz, the author's grandfather, captured three minutes of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in Poland on 16 mm Kodachrome colour film. More than seventy years later, through the brutal twists of history, these few minutes of home-movie footage would become a memorial to an entire community, an entire culture that was annihilated in the Holocaust. Three Minutes in Poland traces Glenn Kurtz's remarkable four year journey to identify the people in his grandfather's haunting images. His search takes him across the…
Since I first began to study the events of the Holocaust in 1991, I became deeply engaged and committed to trying to understand why individuals engaged in the abuse and murder of their neighbors, fellow countrymen, and those deemed racially or politically inferior. In exploring this question, I drew in part on my own military experience to think about how a warped organizational culture and corrupted leadership emerged in Nazi Germany in which state-sponsored propaganda and ideological socialization combined to pervert existing moral and ethical norms and led many within the SS, police, and the German military to engage in genocide.
The Holocaust survivor, Richard Glazar, authored a compelling memoir of his imprisonment and escape from the Nazi killing center at Treblinka in occupied Poland, a site at which an estimated one million Jewish men, women, and children perished at the hands of the SS and their Ukrainian auxiliaries.
Glazar provides a first-hand and extended look not only at the process of mass murder at the camp, but he also provides extensive descriptions and analysis of the SS men he encountered in the camp including their daily habits, personalities, and actions.
The memoir exposes the full range of the emotional, psychological, and physical hardship experienced by Glazar in the “death factory” of Treblinka and places perpetrator actions within the context of prisoner experience.
Trap with a Green Fence is Richard Glazar's memoir of deportation, escape, and survival. In economical prose, Glazar weaves a description of Treblinka and its operations into his evocation of himself and his fellow prisoners as denizens of an underworld. Glazar gives us compelling images of these horrors in a tone that remains thoughtful but sober, affecting but simple.
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I'm a child of Holocaust survivors who spent three years in slave labour camps. My mother told me stories of her experiences a child should probably not hear. The result is that my philosophy of life, and sometimes my writing, can be dark. It’s no surprise that this period of history imbues my novels. I chose to write mysteries to reach a wider audience, the Holocaust connections integral to the stories. During my research, I discovered a wealth of information on the Holocaust but learned that memoirs revealed best what happened to people on the ground. Memoirs draw you into the microcosm of a person’s life with its nostalgia, yearning, and inevitable heartbreak.
Elsa Thon recounts her war experiences in a cinematic tale with the eye of an artist. A teenager in Poland who had apprenticed in photo retouching, she was recruited by the Jewish underground. She left her family behind in the Warsaw Ghetto, ending up in Krakow with false papers. This was difficult for her, a deeply honest person. She writes, “I lied all the time.” She takes the reader with her on her dangerous journey, the degradation of a labour camp, and a forced march. Elsa was also a student in my seniors writing class and I found her to be generous and good-humoured, despite her painful past. She lost her whole family in the Holocaust but she writes that it was her “destiny” to survive.
Elsa Thon was a sixteen-year-old photographer's apprentice when the Nazis occupied her town of Pruszków, Poland. When her family was sent to the Warsaw ghetto, Elsa joined a community farm and was recruited by the Underground. Despite her deep belief in destiny, Elsa refused to bow to her fate as a Jew in war-torn Poland.
