Cat's Meat
short fiction 2011 Realm of the Elderlings
Record
| First published | 2011 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | short fiction |
| Canon status |
Synopsis
"Cat's Meat" is a Robin Hobb short story set near the town of Cogsbay, chronologically earlier than the events of Assassin's Apprentice, though it is not required reading before the novels. The story unfolds over a few days one spring and follows Rosemary, a mother in straitened circumstances, her young child Gillam, and their cat Marmalade, with narration shifting between Rosemary's perspective and the cat's own point of view. Rather than dealing in the political intrigue or magic that dominate Hobb's longer Realm of the Elderlings novels, the story stays close to a single household's daily struggles and the small, practical ways a family gets by. Its dual human-and-animal narration gives an intimate, domestic view of the wider world glimpsed elsewhere through kings, assassins, and dragons, grounding the setting in ordinary survival.
Where it sits
- Universe: Realm of the Elderlings
- Series: not part of a registered series (standalone work within its universe)
- Author: Robin Hobb
Notes
- First published in The Inheritance & Other Stories (2011).
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within Realm of the Elderlings (standalone work): position 17 of 24: previous The Inheritance & Other Stories (2011) · next City of Dragons (2012)
Sources
← Realm of the Elderlings dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.