In the autumn of 1965, flush with the unexpected success of his first published books, the Czech author Bohumil Hrabal bought a cottage in Kersko, a wooded weekenders' settlement about an hour's drive east of Prague. From then until his death in 1997 at the age of 82, he divided his time between Prague and Kersko, where he wrote and tended to a community of feral cats. Over the years, his relationship to cats grew deeper and more complex, becoming a measure of the pressures, both private and public, that impinged on his life as a writer, in a country whose government eyed artists with extreme suspicion. All My Cats , written in 1983 after a serious car accident on the road to Kersko, is best seen as a confessional memoir, composed in the shadow of his private anguish and public humiliation. It is the chronicle of a cat-lover who becomes overwhelmed by his cats and his life, and is driven to the brink of a kind of madness by the dilemmas his indulgent love for the animals have created. In the end, All My Cats becomes a book about Hrabal's relationship to nature, about the unlikely sources of redemption and absolution that come to him unbidden, like a gift from the cosmos.