A powerful and moving novel in which Patrick Gale casts a compassionate yet satirically sharp eye over the pains and abuses inflicted by families, friends and lovers.

Joanna, a Junoesque American photographer, shares a lovely, lonely retreat on Cornwall's Bodmin Moor with her novelist lover, Judith. On an assignment to an African principality, she feels compelled to meet up with Judith's estranged sister, Deborah, whose husband has just been murdered by a bomb meant for someone more important.

Impulsively, Joanna rescues Deborah from the respectable compassion of in-laws and brings her back to Cornwall to recuperate, unaware of the devils this will unleash in her womanly paradise.

As Judith struggles to unlock a new novel and Deborah struggles to keep locked-up the girlhood horrors neither of them has yet confronted, the three women are caught up in a battle that is no less bloody for being so domestic.

The Cat Sanctuary draws closely on the landscape of bleak moorland and rain-sodden valleys in which Patrick Gale was then living.