Publisher's Synopsis
A smart, but unassuming college student embarks on an extraordinary journey of self-discovery after a near-death experience traps her inside the body of a cat. Eliza adapts to her new reality, sustained in her struggle to hold onto her humanity by the love of the one man who knows she's still herself. But Eliza mutely witnesses the life they lived together fade away. When her lover brings other women into their bed, Eliza confronts the truth about what her love is costing her and what losing hers is costing him. A Cat Came Back is a moving parable about what it means to be a human being and how sometimes letting go can be the price of holding on to who you are. "There is a tenderness in Simone Martel's prose that marries well with its cool precision. It invites us into familiar spaces-backyard gardens, bedrooms-where mythical and magical forces are at work, and where a highly conscious cat lightfoots it in and out of the shadows. This is a sparkling, earthy, sexy story, also a resonant allegory of estrangement and self-fashioning." -Robert Roper, author of the biography Nabokov in America About the Author: Simone Martel is the author of a memoir, The Expectant Gardener, and a story collection, Exile's Garden. A Cat Came Back is her first novel. Her essays and stories have appeared in many literary journals, newspapers and magazines, including Hip Mama, Horticulture, Main Street Rag and The Long Story. After studying English at U.C. Berkeley, Simone operated an organic tomato farm near Stockton, California. She's working on a new novel based on her experience in that desolate corner of the Central Valley.
