Deplorable Conversations with Cats and Other Distractions

A man finds himself the unwitting companion of a talking cat. . . Lucky Lee has everything— wealth, charm, money, good looks— and does very, very little with it. He’ s content. He’ s happy. He takes for granted that life is good and always will be. But then his sister, the go-getting, successful, famous TV chef Pearl Lee, dies, horribly and suddenly. Lucky is devastated. As he struggles to live without the big sister who’ s always been the dominant, often relentless force in his life, the inconceivable happens— her cat begins to talk to him. It wants to know where Pearl is. It questions his eating habits, his outfit choices, his life. It hogs the TV. It tells him stories. Now grief-stricken Lucky has a major problem: he may very well be mad.

Yeoh Jo-Ann grew up in Malaysia and lives in Singapore. As a teenager, she dreamt of being a cat or a rock star, but instead spent most of her adult life working in publishing, somehow ending up as the features editor of a women’ s magazine before giving it up for a career in digital marketing. Her first novel, Impractical Uses of Cake, won the Epigram Books Fiction Prize in Singapore in 2018 and has been translated into German. Her short stories have been included in Singaporean anthologies such as Best Singaporean Short Stories: Volume Three.