The Shanghai Cat

We are never ready. The universe decides for us, and we go forward into whatever lies ahead.

On an autumn equinox, in the rain, beside a shrine older than the city around it, a man with nothing left to lose finds two black kittens and carries them home. Over the seasons that follow, one of them leads him through the lanes of Shanghai to the people he will come to belong among: a woman who will not say what she is, an old Vietnamese widow who has not laughed in decades, a vet and his wife with a history they have never spoken of, a young artist who remembers what she could not have seen. It is a book about strays of every kind, about hearts that fail and hearts that mend, and about a family put together, slowly, out of strangers. All four books in one volume, signed and numbered. Inspired by actual events.