Featuring quirky, vintageinspired illustrations, this charming story tells the tale of a cat moving to a new island home, where things take an unexpected turn.
When a curious cat named Tibbles and her owner move across the world from England to a new home on a small island off the coast of New Zealand in 1894, everything seems idyllic at first. Then things go horribly wrong. In this charming little story, the oblivious, amusing hero, Tibbles, discovers a rare species of flightless bird that had never previously been described – the Stephens Island wren. Unfortunately, Tibbles also becomes the cause of the bird’s extinction by preying on them.
Beneath the surface of this whimsically told story is a sophisticated tragicomic plot with a foundation in Greek tragedy. Tibbles’s killing of the Stephens Island wrens led to the eventual extinction of the entire species, and the tragedy is heightened by the fact that Tibbles was not a malicious or malevolent creature, but