Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    MagnifiCat
    Unavailable
    MagnifiCat
    Unavailable
    MagnifiCat
    Ebook268 pages3 hours

    MagnifiCat

    By Danielle de Valera

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Enter a fantastic realm where animals talk and internal combustion engines are verboten. Meet the Katt family: Claude (a big hearted marmalade tom cat), his lady cat Mao, Mao’s mother Sylvia and Mao’s two kittens, Pussywillow and Rupert.
    Despite the love in their little cottage, the battlers are finding it hard to make ends meet. Still, they are happy. Mao runs the house and pots in her spare time; Claude works as a barcat at the Railway Hotel and has a jazz group à la Benny Goodman, called The Rainbow Connection, which makes a little money on the side. The only blot on Claude’s landscape is that, through no fault of his own, he has lost touch with his mother.
    Across the road from the Katts live the Franchettis (both calico cats). Mr and Mrs Franchetti are retired banana farming cats; their son Bruno (always referred to on the street as Franchetti), is a close friend of Claude’s, a Vietnam vet and a softie for homeless animals. Franchetti plays clarinet to Claude’s saxophone in The Rainbow Connection. Other members of the sextet are Dollar Dog (trumpet), Wild Cat, who believes he’s the rightful heir to the throne of Ireland (guitar), the wrongly named Major Mitchell, a white cockatoo (acoustic bass), and Maxi-Max, an immense bearded dragon, who plays the drums.
    Mao’s mother Sylvia mortgages the house to start a small herbalism business from home to provide for Rupert and Pussywillow’s future education; but then a recession hits the small town hard. Animals line the soles of their shoes with their cancelled credit cards, and no one has any disposable income to pay for a herbalist. To add to the family’s woes, the Railway Hotel burns down, and Claude finds himself out of work. There is only one other hotel in the small town and its wallaby owner already has all the staff she needs. Sylvia’s 3,000 pounds is soon gone. (The shire reverted to Imperial currency after the secession of ‘83.)
    Claude takes on a variety of casual work, ending up as a nurses’ aide at the Felines’ Nursing Home in the nearby township of Shelly Bay. When Sylvia falls behind with the loan repayments, and the bank won’t grant more time to pay the mortgage, the Katts are in danger of losing their house. Sylvia exhorts the family to economise, and the cats become reluctant vegetarians. Sylvia sells an antique cedar bookcase that had been in the family for years, Claude hocks his saxophone and Rupert takes to fishing to augment the family table. Still, they are living below the poverty line, can’t even afford to have mince in their spaghetti bolognese.
    One day, after the family has been grocery shopping with an inadequate amount of money, they find a wallet containing eighty pounds in the parking lot behind the supermarket. It has ID, and Mao insists they return it to its rightful owner. This turns out to be an elderly rabbit named Lucy Lapine, who is searching for someone, but just who this someone might be is a mystery. The Katts hope for a small reward to ease their situation — being vegetarians, they’ve decided, is a real downer. Instead, the elderly doe gives them a large bunch of flowers.
    In desperation, Mao and Claude go looking for opals on the ridge to the north-east of town. At the last moment, they are joined by Rupert’s friend Jacko, a neglected rabbit whose drunken father makes moonshine in the hills. After an adventure involving a strange community of rabbits who dress in eleventh century clothing, the house is saved, Claude is reunited with his mother, and Pussywillow’s and Rupert’s friend Jacko will have a good home at last.
    This is a feel-good book, the perfect escape when you're feeling blue - the drugless drug with no adverse side-effects.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDanielle de Valera
    Release dateDec 4, 2013
    ISBN9780992331115
    Unavailable
    MagnifiCat
    Author

    Danielle de Valera

    Until now, Danielle de Valera's been best known for her short stories, which have appeared in such diverse magazines as Penthouse, Aurealis and the Australian Women’s Weekly.All in all, she's had a chequered career. She’s worked as a botanist, an editor, a cataloguer for the Queensland Department of Primary Industries Library and the John Oxley Library, and on the main floor of Arnott’s biscuit factory.The manuscript of her 1st ever novel (then titled Love the People!) was placed 2nd to published author Hugh Atkinson's in the Australia-wide Xavier Society Literary Award for an unpublished novel - in those days, there was no Vogel Award for Unpublished Writers under 35. After that, she abandoned writing for 25 years to raise her children, whom she raised alone.She resumed writing in 1990, somewhat behind the eight-ball. With Louise Forster she won the Australia-New Zealand-wide Emma Darcy Award for Romance Manuscript of the Year 2000 with Found: One Lover.That first novel, Love the People! was shortlisted for the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival Unpublished Manuscript Award in 2011, and for the UK’s Impress Prize in 2012, under the title A Few Brief Seasons. It's due out here in October 2021 under its final title Those Brisbane Romantics.A freelance manuscript assessor and fiction editor since 1992, she has won numerous awards for her gritty, streetwise short stories. MagnifiCat, a departure from this style, is her first published novel. It was followed in 2017 by Dropping Out: a tree-change novel in stories - to put it another way, a collection of linked short stories.For more information on this author, see Smashwords iInterview. There's lots there.About that NameDanielle de Valera’s father claimed he was related to the controversial Irish politician Eamon de Valera on his mother’s side. But he told some tall tales in his time, and this is sure to be one of them. Born Danielle Ellis, she found that this name was replicated many times on the web. In searching for another under which to write, she first tried her mother's maiden name, Doyle, but there were a number of those, too. What to do? Then she remembered her father’s story and chose it as her writing name. But she feels any real connection is unlikely.

    Read more from Danielle De Valera

    Related to MagnifiCat

    Related ebooks

    Fantasy For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Bookshelf

      Mar 2, 2020

      There are simply some books that you inadvertently read out loud to whoever is closest—cat or human. I found myself having a giant laugh and then being unable to resist sharing long passages of Carla Funk’s memoir. Though I worried that the religious

      5 min read

    • Article

      Worlds Of Ink And Paper

      Nov 22, 2022

      As a young girl, I still remember my dear mother, smile on her face, curled up with Family Circle magazine in her lap. She was engrossed in an article titled “Butternut Wisdom,” written by Gladys Taber. At my age, it didn’t mean a thing to me. But as

      6 min read

    • Article

      Christmas Gifts

      Nov 6, 2019

      Anna Chiu is not part of the “Shore Lakes High Asians”, high achievers with tiger mums and designer gear who score 99.99 in every exam. She leaves school to bus home to take care of her younger siblings and help Baba in his restaurant, while her depr

      3 min read

    • Article

      Cul-de-Sac

      Dec 1, 2021

      That old rage for order: how my father drove a square mouthed mower over-and-back, over-and-back, each row of neatly trimmed grass cut just like he told his barber: boy’s short, regular. O pioneer, taming this joke bit of prairie, no bindweed or dog

      5 min read

    • Article

      Dusty Magic

      Nov 11, 2019

      Dusty Magic
      6 min read

    • Article

      My Country Childhood

      Sep 4, 2019

      AUTHOR AND FORMER executive director of the Australian Writers Guild, Angela Wales, 71, moved from Bondi in Sydney to Walcha in the Northern Tablelands of NSW when she was five years old. Angela’s father, Bob, was to take over a struggling sheep prop

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Cats ‘go To Town’!

      Feb 23, 2024

      The Cats ‘go To Town’!
      6 min read

    • Article

      To Catch A Woozle

      Apr 1, 2020

      To Catch A Woozle
      5 min read

    • Article

      100-WORD-STORY COMPETITION Winners

      Aug 16, 2022

      We’ve been delighted by the huge response to our 100-word-story competition. The entries have flooded in thick and fast during the past few months, but while we’ve enjoyed reading every story, only a few can come out on top! You, our readers, voted t

      5 min read

    • Article

      Hair-raising Holidays

      Jul 31, 2022

      Hair-raising Holidays
      2 min read

    • Article

      On Country

      Nov 9, 2016

      On Country
      5 min read

    • Article

      Ngā Pukapuka

      Dec 7, 2020

      Ngā Pukapuka
      4 min read

    • Article

      Autumn Reading

      Mar 25, 2020

      A charming novel about a ready-to-retire Paris psychiatrist, who is counting the hours until his final session. Our protagonist has never spoken to his next-door neighbour, although he hears the old gent rattling around at night. He has never enquire

      7 min read

    • Article

      Home Bound

      May 18, 2020

      Home Bound
      6 min read

    • Article

      Join The Weekly CONVERSATION

      Mar 12, 2023

      I loved the excerpt from “What Your Chickens Want You to Know” (NZWW, Feb 27). It brought back so many memories. My hens were the most coddled, best looked-after hens in the world. Our hen house was called Buck Palace after a neighbour said, “What ar

      3 min read

    • Article

      Christmas Gifts

      Oct 30, 2019

      Did you ever pine after the cake decorations as a child, not the cake? The pointy ballerina, caped crusader? Bowerbird Marion Frith understands the miniature world that children love to inhabit; her own hunting from around the world housed in an alph

      3 min read

    • Article

      Country-house Clawdo

      Jan 24, 2024

      Country-house Clawdo
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Dancing Skinny

      Jul 11, 2019

      The Dancing Skinny
      12 min read

    • Article

      Six Poems

      Feb 28, 2023

      Dear C, At first Virgil’s poem is quite dull; equivocalnames of products at The Container Store: Elfa White Medium Drawer, Mesh NarrowRolling Cart (Medium Solution), Narrow Classic Mesh Box and the number of pirouetting starseach product attained. An

      5 min read

    • Article

      Reader’s Choice

      Jul 13, 2020

      Reader’s Choice
      4 min read

    • Article

      Swansongs And Southern Discomfort

      Oct 27, 2022

      THE BORDERLAND BETWEEN popular fiction and literary fiction is now fertile territory. Once upon a time it was easy to tell them apart. Popular and genre fiction were in small format paper-backs, literary fiction larger: now all have been promoted to

      6 min read

    Reviews for MagnifiCat

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words