My Cat Yugoslavia cover art

My Cat Yugoslavia

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

My Cat Yugoslavia

By: Pajtim Statovci
Narrated by: Ben Allen
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £14.99

Buy Now for £14.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

In 1980s Yugoslavia, a young Muslim girl is married off to a near stranger, and the match quickly turns sour.

Shortly thereafter, the country is torn apart by war and they flee to Finland, where her son Bekim grows up to become a social outcast, a foreigner, and a gay man in an unaccepting society. His only true companion is a boa constrictor that he lets roam around his apartment.

©2014 Pajtim Statovci (P)2017 W.F. Howes Ltd Fantasy Fiction Genre Fiction Literature & Fiction Magical Realism Magic

Listeners also enjoyed...

 The Truth About These Strange Times cover art
The Whale Tattoo cover art
Lucky Boy cover art
A Thousand Splendid Suns cover art
A Wolf at the Table cover art
White Gardenia cover art
Hum If You Don't Know the Words cover art
All the Names They Used for God cover art
A Cup of Friendship cover art
Redemption Road cover art
The Long Gaze Back cover art
In Her Wake cover art

Critic reviews

"A gripping and ambitious novel...Pajtim Statovci is a voice to remember." ( Elle)
"A marvel, a remarkable achievement, and a world apart from anything you are likely to read this year." ( The New York Times Book Review)
All stars
Most relevant  
amazing affective turn novel, a story I had never come across before. Both gripping and influentional.

amazing

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I thought this was a very good novel, with a lot of great narrative flourishes. it evokes a lot from the Kosovan and Finnish settings and gives a very powerful sense of the refugee experience through generations.

Ben Allen has a great whack at the dual narrator structure, a really good listen.

Smart, gripping and sad

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This is a refugee story, about the lives within a family and interspersed with the dynamics of the 1st-person protagonist's magic/ surreal relationships with a cat-human, and with his pet snake. The Yugoslavian writer is depressed, feels somewhat disconnected with his new adopted country of Finland. He has attachment issues and is prone to self-hate. He is also quite frustrating as he oftens behaves badly, sometimes towards the animals. The cat-human character, seemingly representing the self-hate he internalised from his father and homophobic Yugoslavian cultural heritage just felt like he'd never spent time with a feline. While I can empathise with the negative feeling, especially at his age, I am older and was bored by the miserable tone and found it not especially rewarding. I like complexity and original writing, however his disconnection from the world makes it a bit flat for me.
The reader may make the book work for others, but I found his separate falsetto and gruff tone for the protagonist's parents got very grating.

Sad, quirky story of refugee's disconnection

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.