Claude is a big hearted marmalade cat, who moved to the country to escape city life. He works as a barcat in Tuckaburra, a small country town once a centre of the counterculture movement in Australia. Here, he lives happily with partner Mao, Mao's two catlings Wintergreen and Rupert, and Mao's mother Sylvia, who owns the cottage they all live in.
All is rosy until ...
Sylvia mortgages the cottage to start a herbalism business to provide for Wintergreen and Rupert's higher education. Then the hotel Claude works in burns down. Claude has a series of misadventures in part-time jobs as he tries to save the family home. Through it all, he never loses his belief in his personal fable:
Things always work out in the end.
The cats are forced to start selling the furniture to meet the mortgage repayments. (A rich koala from Possum Shoot buys the bookcase.) When all seems lost, a good deed Mao once insisted the family do pays off in an unexpected way.
Lose your blues in this all-animal tale, based on the author's own novel,
MagnifiCat,
published here in 2014. No longer available.