Nine Lives

Two months after her mother's death, Rosemary is woken each morning by a scrawny marmalade cat mewling at her window. She feeds it out of pity, and it never leaves.

That's unsettling, because her mother was fearless and funny but had a lifelong, almost pathological terror of cats. Only once did anything hint at why. When Rosemary was eleven, a strange little man in a trilby on a London bus claimed that he and her mother had been siblings in ancient Egypt. He said a fire he started had trapped her with feral cats, which mauled her to death.

Now Rosemary can't shake one wild thought: has her mother come back?