How to Live Together

A precariously employed academic moves into a house in Oxford to cat-sit, seeking solitude away from the complications of living with other people.

They expect the cats to be nothing but a minor inconvenience, the price of a house to themself as they write and read. But the cats’ insistent presence disturbs the polarities that structure their thinking, of human and non-human, natural and artificial, masculine and feminine, self and other, art and life.

Voices, emails, fears and fantasies penetrate the thick walls of the house, while the cats become foils for the narrator’s failed relations with humans—the housemates they hold at a distance, the former student with whom they develop an erotic obsession, the colleague whose effortless boyishness they envy.

Written with a revelatory clarity, Rey Conquer’s astonishing debut novel is a meditation on desire, dependence, language, gender and the non-human, a work of embodied philosophy that asks what it means to be open to others and to the world.

‘A sensuous, non-conforming novel about gender, the loneliness of company, and the clamour of solitude, told in prose so fine it hurts.’ Caleb Klaces, author of Mr Outside

‘I loved How to Live Together, a melancholy, wry novel in which a solitary narrator’s attempts to care for two disobedient cats morphs into a compact treatise about relationship, as burden, risk, hope, necessity.’ Will Rees, author of Hypochondria