Blitzcat

Blitzcat tells the story of black cat Lord Gort as she travels across England through the Blitz in search of her beloved 'human'. Her journey acts as the thread for a series of stories about the people she meets along the way, from a trainload of soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk, to the lonely rear-gunner she keeps company, flying missions over the Channel. And her cat-instincts are infallible when it comes to air raids!

Blitzcat won the 1989 Smarties Book Prize and is a powerful but tender panorama of life during the Second World War. The rawness of Westall’s descriptions, particularly of the bombing of Coventry, make the book more suitable for older children, but it’s also a moving portrayal of a cat devoted to her owner. Few authors capture the poignancy and pathos of war as sensitively and vividly as Robert Westall: Blitzcat is a modern classic.