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The boy was so pale you would have thought he was a ghost. A wraith. Something insubstantial that would vanish into nothing at all. His hair was the colour of moonlight, very fine and very straight, and his skin was milky-white with a dull translucence to it, like wax. Indeed, so fair was he that at a distance he seemed to have no eyebrows or eyelashes at all and this incompleteness only emphasized his ephemeral appearance.

"Meow?" the boy said.
"Hello Conor", James replied. "Won't you come in?"
"Meow?"

Thus starts Torey Hayden's newest novel, a fascinating study of family interactions, emotional disturbance and, in the end, creativity.

Conor, aged nine, arrives in the play therapy room of child psychiatrist James Innes with the diagnosis "autistic". His mother Laura, an aloof, enigmatic novelist, can not handle him. His rancher father, embroiled in divorcing Laura, does not feel there is anything really wrong with Conor.

His six year old sister Morgana insists he really does see ghosts.

As James becomes convinced Conor is not autistic, he is drawn first into Conor's strange world of "things the cat knows" and then into Morgana's stories of her friend the "Lion King".

James is pulled most deeply, however, into Laura's world, at first that of a lonely, rather difficult woman, and then, eventually into the world of her imagination, a world she has made up but yet is so full of sights and smells, of people going about their daily lives that it is hard to know if they are real or not.

This is a rich, multi-layered novel, compellingly written, a feast for thinkers, especially those who enjoy pondering a book after they have turned the last page.
- Carol Thorson

TOREY says that although the story is entirely fiction, she wrote it to explore her own experiences with creativity. She had a very vivid fantasy life as a young child which started much the way Laura's did in the scene from the book and it carried on well into her twenties. She says that also, like Laura, she used to "drive people nuts" when she was an adolescent by making up scenarios and characters and "testing" them in real life to see if they were realistic.

THE MECHANICAL CAT has not been accepted for publication in English. In rejecting the novel, her publisher told her this was because the book did not fit into an existing genre. It was actually described as "too novel". As a consequence, the book had its world debut in Sweden, followed a week later by the Italian publication and in Finland. Now published in Japanese, it has gone on to become a best seller in all four countries.

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