Kitten Author: Stacey YuISBN-13: 9781399754309Publisher: Sceptre Guideline Price: £18.99; 288pp There is nothing more off-putting to any potential book reviewer than the insipid explanations some publishers are foisting upon their authors in the form of an anodyne, explicatory essay that accompanies the press release. These essays are a testament to the lengths authors are required to go to get their work seen in the current, brutal market. Imagine Kafka having to write one for Metamorphosis or (posthumously) The Castle? “Dear reader, Gregor turning into a giant insect is a metaphor for ...” or, “Dear reader, in not allowing K to reach the castle, I was expressing my frustration with ...”This abasement aside, Kitten is a strange, vibrant and genuinely idiosyncratic novel. Katie, our protagonist, in her dreamlike dissociation from reality, her unwillingness to grow up, and her almost unhealthy obsession with cats, is a fascinating embodiment of Gen Z personhood. Also, her obsession with her own childhood, her mother’s rights and wrongs, seems a “newly adulted” preoccupation, indulged until you realise that, if you’re still here, managing, they probably did a good enough job. Yet even in this, her thinking is peculiar enough to remain sufficiently interesting.[ Writer Lucy Sweeney Byrne: In the 16 years that I have been attempting to write ‘professionally’, I’ve made in and around €15,000Opens in new window ] Katie vomits, pisses herself and takes her boyfriend’s cat hostage, making her a genuinely unpredictable, and thus engrossing, character (I have no interest in saying “likable” because she isn’t, particularly, but what does that matter if she’s great to read?). Her inner monologue is witty and cutting, and even at times delightfully devastating, all delivered in that ever deadpan, Gen Z style. At moments I laughed aloud, as when she observes: “Mothers to me were an inappropriate choice for coffee table conversation, the intimacy it forced akin to divulging your bowel movements.”Or, when observing the colour of her boyfriend’s sheets: “Naval Service was a stupid colour, just a prissier version of black.” After the denouement the conclusive section drags a little, but not terminally, and that could just be an old, withered millennial’s distrust of the idea of epiphanies or wide-eyed personal growth. As a commercially viable piece of debut fiction, Kitten is exceptionally good. Buy it for the cat-obsessed youth in your life immediately – they’ll probably shrug and say nothing, but in Gen Z I believe that means “wow, thanks”.Lucy Sweeney Byrne is the author of two story collections, Paris Syndrome (2019) and Let’s Dance (2024). Her forthcoming novel, Brief Tableau, Brief Laugh, will be published in September 2027 by Banshee Press