The Museum of Cathy

Guardian Fiction: Book of the Day

From the author of the Orange Prize long-listed, The Pink Hotel

Cathy is a young woman who escapes her feral childhood in a rundown chalet on the East coast of England to become a curator of natural history in Berlin. Although seemingly liberated from her destructive past, she commemorates her most significant memories and love affairs – one savage, one innocent, one full of potential – in a collection of objects that form a bizarre museum of her life. When an old lover turns up at a masked party at Berlin's natural history museum and events take a terrifying turn, Cathy must confront their shared secrets in order to protect her future. This is an exquisitely crafted, rare and original work.



How well do we really know other people – or ourselves? That’s the provocative question that drives Anna Stothard’s astonishing American debut.



Stylish… captures an outsider’s gape at sun-drenched Los Angeles.



Astonishingly good … Stothard’s writing is accomplished and very engaging.



Anna Stothard’s third book, after the much-praised Isabel and Rocco and The Pink Hotel, confirms her talent: the prose here can be transfixingly good.



Anna Stothard’s third novel cements her her place as one of Britain’s best young authors… Stothard’s lush, dreamy prose is given full rein …



A sinister debut from an author who shows serious promise. The plot has echoes of Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden – two children mysteriously left alone by their parents.



Anna Stothard’s pre-university debut is dazzling … surly and oversexed, vulnerable and murderous … it is remarkably accomplished.



Stothard’s claustrophobic and compelling atmosphere of sadistic sexual fizz between her two main characters keeps the reader gripped.



I was completely swept away with this story. Stothard’s technique allows us to watch events unfold with regular insights into Cathy’s past that slowly reveal the reality of what she has been hiding from with a steadily rising sense of foreboding. I found the exploration of characters sensitively handled and yet provided enough suspense and contained a level of sinister tension that had me guessing just what each one may be capable of. This is exquisite, beautifully written prose and the use of the museum as a theme throughout with setting, a means of storytelling and metaphor, is quite brilliantly executed. It is personal, it is universal and it is something that lives within each of us and the memories we hold. Cathy’s story moved me and I so wanted her to find the escape she desperately needed. Highly recommended



If this sounds like a cheap thriller, it’s anything but — Stothard’s exquisite prose sees to that. Instead, it’s a glitteringly lyrical portrait of an emotionally remote young woman who, at the age of ten, was involved in a tragedy that has indelibly scarred her and who, for most of her life, has taken more solace in collecting random objects than she has in people … a gripping slow-burner which finds deep metaphorical resonance in museums and the natural world for its themes of memory and rebirth.



The Museum of Cathy, from Orange Prize-shortlistee Anna Stothard can occasionally make for uncomfortable reading as a raw, intricate look into a young woman’s beautiful, broken world. At times the reader can feel like a human pinball, being fired through the erratic psyche of the three main characters, stuck in their innermost thoughts in desperate need of fresh air and a faster pace.



Stothard steers her narrative forward steadily and with great control, perhaps another aspect of this being a bulwark against all the frightening things in the world. This is a novel to be savoured, not least for its teeming parade of beasts: the text itself is a wunderkammer that makes us swoon with its surfeit of content. But, beyond that, it contains a wealth of emotional truth which is held out like a rope to rescue the drowning. The complex unfolding of the plot, like reverse origami, is beautifully done. We attempt to assert control over our lives by imposing order but, as Stothard shows, ultimately things need to be overturned so that we can breathe and grow.



The Museum of Cathy is a gripping and stylish novel. Stothard’s lacko fo formal innovaton is more than compensated for by its emotional punch, which both staggers the reader and had the potential to transform our understanding of violent relationships.