Books like The Guest Cat — picked by fans

This one is different from the others because everyone loves a story, don’t they? Through Keiko, Sayaka Murata explores what it means to find stability within a clearly defined role while showing how quickly systems and social expectations question anything outside the norm. 

There is a terrific, palpable tension: a system that rewards conformity set against an individual making deliberate choices about how to live within or alongside it. I applaud Murata’s deft hand to expose how social pressure can determine identity, labour, and belonging, making Keiko’s small acts feel both radical and painfully ordinary. The novel asks a simple, urgent question: who decides what a meaningful working life looks like?

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.

Unforeseen forces, mystery, and time travel in the confines of a coffee shop, what isn’t to like?

I read this book when I was in the middle of moving countries. The book helped me to slow down amongst all the turbulence of movers and then the dreaded Covid vaccination certificates. But with moving, I had to say goodbye to friends, and there was one close friend who did not like the fact I was leaving and, therefore, refused to see me before I left. There are many reasons why people react in certain ways, but I was hurt during that time and hoped that our friendship was more than that. 

This book made me think about what I would say to her in the future—hindsight is a great gift if only we could activate it in the present.

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.

This book is very personal to me as I have so many special memories rummaging and exploring through the shelves at Nakano Broadway during my time living in Japan. Each gossip-themed chapter had me laughing at points as I discovered more about the characters through their habits and charms. This cozy book is one for that nostalgic, Sunday afternoon feeling. 

This is a book by one of my favorite contemporary Japanese writers.

Sweet Bean Paste is both charming and horrifying. The main character with a criminal past tries to turn his life around by working at a confectionary stall selling sweet pancakes to passersby. At this stall he meets an elderly woman with warped hands.

Through her we learn of the horrors of how leprosy patients used to be treated. It’s an enlightening and, yes, sweet tale and shows that the young have much to learn from those who came before them.

This book has stayed with me for years, which is itself a testament to how remarkable it is.

What makes this Holocaust survival story unique—and what I find profoundly mysterious, verging on mystical—is Malach the cat, whom I came to see as 12-year-old Mala's guardian angel.

There's something inexplicable about their bond that I can personally identify with, and that I hold with wonder rather than question. Some things are better held with wonder than explained.

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.

Sadly, I think this book is, in my opinion, underrated by readers. It’s a novel with scenes always starting at 1 am, and it follows interconnected characters through their nights working and living in Tokyo. The reader not only gets a really interesting peek into life for graveyard workers, but the setting is evocative.

I particularly love how the mundanity of working the night shift as a cab driver, a social assistance hotline worker, or a procurer for movie sets, etc., are really captured in a very quintessential Japanese way that many American readers may overlook. Read this one to learn more about honor and obligation in modern Japan as told through interesting characters!

Tokyo Year Zero follows detective Minami on the hunt for a serial killer in the immediate post-war period. It is a haunting and addictive journey inside the underbelly of Japan’s shattered capital city in the glaring light of defeat. There is crime, gang warfare, desolation, corruption, and decay. But Peace is above all a master of language, and his prose – fragmentary, truncated, hallucinatory – produces an idiosyncratic rhythm that mirrors the mental disintegration of a man and the convulsions of an entire city. A novel that will stick to your skin years after reading it.