Strays: The True Story of a Lost Cat, a Homeless Man, and Their Journey Across America

For fans of A Street Cat Named Bob and Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World, “this lovely, luminous story will warm your heart and make you laugh and want to share your life with a rescue cat” (Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats).

Alcoholic and depressed, Michael King lives on the streets of Portland, Oregon, and sleeps in a UPS loading bay. One raining night, he stumbles upon a hurt, starving, scruffy cat cowering beneath a café table and takes her in. He names her Tabor, nurses her back to health, and she becomes something of a celebrity in Southeast Portland. When winter comes, they travel from Oregon to the beaches of California to the high plains of Montana, surviving blizzards, bears, angry steers, and rainstorms.

Along the way, people are drawn to the spirited, beautiful cat and are moved to help Michael, who cuts a striking figure with Tabor riding high on his backpack or walking on a leash. Tabor comforts Michael when he’s down, giving him someone to love and care for, and inspiring him to get sober and to come to terms with his past family traumas and grief over the death of his life partner.

As they make their way along the West Coast, the pair become inseparable, healing the scars of each other’s troubled pasts. When Michael takes Tabor to a veterinarian in Montana, he discovers that Tabor has an identification chip and an owner in Portland who has never given up hope of finding his beloved cat. Michael is faced with the difficult choice of keeping Tabor or returning her to her rightful owner—and, once again, facing the streets alone.

Britt Collins is an English journalist who writes for the Guardian, the Sunday Times, the Independent, Harper’s Bazaar, Condé Nast Traveller, and Billionaire.com. She has volunteered at animal sanctuaries around the world, from tending big cats and baboons in Namibia to wild horses in Nevada—a labor of love that has inspired features for the Guardian and the Sunday Times. While writing Sunday People, she has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for many international charities through her investigative animal-cruelty stories; as an activist, she has helped shut down controversial breeders of laboratory animals. She lives with her cats in London.