The Ninth Life of Missy

May Calloway has never been a person who stays.

At twenty-three she has a one-way ticket to Ireland, an apartment full of boxes she started packing the day she moved in, and a lifetime of practice at leaving first — before anyone else can decide she isn't worth keeping. Greenport was only ever a place to wait out the season. The plan was simple. The plan did not account for the cat.

Missy — a torn-eared tabby, unimpressed by everything, a stray nobody else wanted — was supposed to be temporary too. Gone by spring. But there is something in the way the cat watches her. Something that feels less like being tolerated and more like being seen. And one box at a time, against every rule May has built her life around, the leaving stops.

Set on the working waterfront of Long Island's North Fork, The Ninth Life of Missy is a tender, funny, quietly devastating novel about grief carried gently, love that arrives in the shape you least expect, and a woman discovering — almost too late — that she might be worth staying for.

For readers of Remarkably Bright Creatures and A Man Called Ove.

Raj Shankar writes warm, literary fiction about home, belonging, and the stubborn people who decide to stay. By day he practices immigration law on Long Island - work that runs quietly beneath both of his novels, each one circling the same question: what it means to build a life in a place that never quite promised to keep you.He lives on Long Island with his wife and their three cats - Toby, Lyla, and Peanut - the namesakes and unofficial editorial board of Three Cats Press. The Ninth Life of Missy is his second novel.www.threecatspress.com