Djida, I remember: A Memoir for a Cat

When the author brought home a frightened tortoiseshell kitten from a pet shop in Nice, she did not yet know that this small, distant creature would become her anchor through seventeen years of love, loss, and unraveling. She did not know that the cat she had not chosen would, one day, choose her back.

Djida, I Remember is a fragmented elegy in the spirit of Georges Perec's Je me souviens - a memoir told entirely in flashes, each one beginning with the same three words. From a shabby studio haunted by rage to a Christmas alone in Paris, from the Bataclan to a final injection in a white room, Aurore Guilhamet maps a life by way of a cat: every leap, every velvet footstep, every quiet purr at the edge of sleep.

A small, devastating book about how the smallest creatures can hold the largest griefs - and how memory itself becomes the last act of love.

For readers of H Is for Hawk, The Year of Magical Thinking, and anyone who has ever loved an animal enough to be changed by them.