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.



Rey Conquer grew up in Nottingham and lives in London. After a PhD on German poetry and art theory they taught literature, film and translation for eight years. In 2024 they were the inaugural translator-in-residence at Holocaust Centre North, and they co-run The Fair Organ, a pamphlet press. How to Live Together is their first novel.