White Cat: a not entirely fictional mystery

By Simon Cole

White Cat...

... pioneers a genre of reflective writing anchored in real lives and events.

The unending dance of life and death and love runs through the story of a family whose members knew South Africa and India and post-war Vienna and drew others into their world... an army officer, a Xhosa girl, a Quaker nurse. The white cat symbolises the family's individualities and forgotten experiences as they reappear unexpectedly and unremarked.

This is a part-fictional account of four generations of a family, pivoting around Barbara, the last of her era, whose death at 104 gathered the threads of intertwined lives in a century of upheaval. Though only a part of the action of the story is hers directly, the author brings us into the experiences of her forebears and contemporaries as if we were moving between adjacent rooms, party to the thoughts and innermost feelings of the players in each: he juxtaposes metaphors of stage and dwelling, following emotional threads across disparate locations and times.

"... a confusion of sets and settings when the action moved, sometimes you could see it but sometimes it was offstage and reported, and then you have to trust the word passed down across the terraces of history, the hardships, the joys, the resentments, the hopes, the terror, the humanity, the resilience... and somewhere back along the way, still tolling, the bourdon bell which marked the tide of war."

... in the end, one mystery, or more?

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0B8VTNZF5
• ISBN13: 9798844412356
• Release Date: August 2022
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.0" x 8.0"