The Cat and The City

'Nick Bradley's ingenious choreography of a constantly moving city, is touching, surprising and sometimes heartbreaking.' Guardian

Nick Bradley's ingenious choreography of a constantly moving city, is touching, surprising and sometimes heartbreaking .

The key pleasure of reading this book is its sprightly vigour - cool but not hipsterish, ambitious but not pretentious - that evokes a similar liveliness in the reader. It makes you feel young again.

Inventive, beguiling.

An ideal tonic for anyone craving far-flung adventure.

Intriguing ...explores the dark underbelly of Japan.

I wolfed down these interlocking stories of cats, Tokyo, loneliness and redemption. Congratulations to Nick Bradley on this vibrant and accomplished debut.

The Cat and The City is a love letter to Japan and its literature . Bradley's passion for everything from onigiri to Tanizaki's short stories is woven into this book. Bradley was for a time an ex-pat and his insight into their perching state is particularly intriguing. He is also very clearly a man with a great tenderness for cats.

In a very impressive, finely observed debut, Nick Bradley masterfully weaves together seemingly disparate threads to conjure up a vivid tapestry of Tokyo ; its glory, its shame, its characters, and a calico cat.

An inventive, clever and beguiling read. With Tokyo as the backdrop, this is a beautifully written novel about belonging and loneliness, about escape and destruction, where the enmeshed narratives (and a magical cat) bind the city together.

Like the street cat that slinks through this, Nick Bradley is endlessly resourceful, full of invention, full of surprises .

Tender, delicate, and surprising , The Cat and The City is a lovely, rare progeny of a meeting between the English and the Japanese imagination.

The Cat and The City is fiercely vivid, darkly comic and exquisitely mesmerising . Prepare to be transported across a sprawling metropolis; intercepting lives, as culture, history and identity interweave in a novel that will stay with you indelibly. Utterly brilliant writing.

Reading The Cat and The City is a rare experience of immersion in a world so complete that you will feel you know Tokyo like a character all its own , and feel homesick for it once you turn the final page. I loved the playfulness of form, the patience and skill of the storytelling and above all, the jolts of delighted and poignant recognition as narratives connected in subtle and powerful ways.

Bradley has produced a vivid urban map where "lifers" of all nationalities are trapped in a dark place. Hosts of readers will already be looking forward to what he serves up next in the fiction stakes.

Bradley's storytelling is artful and thickly allusive ... For those who love tales of cats, cities or both, it makes for a charming wander .

Nick Bradley is a graduate of the UEA Creative Writing MA who is currently completing a PhD in Creative & Critical Writing, focussing on the figure of the cat in Japanese literature.