You’ll never look at cats in the same way after reading York author Matt Haig’s new children’s novel, reports STEPHEN LEWIS

CALLING all children. Next time you’re trudging to school with only double maths to look forward to, see a cat sunbathing blissfully on a windowsill and wish you could swap places: stop.

Don’t even go there. Not for a second. Because if you’re not very careful, you may find your wish coming true – and you probably won’t like the consequences.

That’s just what happens to 12-year-old Barney Willow in To Be A Cat, York author Matt Haig’s scarily scrumptious new novel for children.

Barney’s parents have split up; his dad has disappeared; and worst of all, he is bullied at school and picked on by his headteacher from hell, Miss Whipmire.

Life hardly seems worth living: and when Barney finds a moggy rubbing itself up against his leg one day as he walks home from school, he briefly wishes he could be a cat.

Next morning, he wakes up to find that wish has come true. But being a cat, he finds, isn’t all it’s cut up to be.

First of all, everything has suddenly become strange, and frighteningly big. His mum doesn’t recognise him; the family pet – a King Charles Spaniel known as Guster – has become a mortal enemy; and when he’s thrown out of the house as a stray, he finds all the street cats are out to get him too.

He should have known better, laughs Matt, who lives with his young family in South Esplanade, York. Because cats are magical creatures: and one of their many powers is that of ‘cross-species, two-way metamorphosis’. In other words, if you wish too hard in the presence of a cat, you could find yourself becoming the cat, and the cat becoming you.

To Be A Cat is a dark, rip-roaring tale in the Roald Dahl tradition, featuring magic, close scrapes galore, and a wonderfully malevolent villain.

That villain is Barney’s headteacher, Miss Whipmire. Cat-Barney soon learns Miss Whipmire used to be a cat herself (she is brought to wonderful life in the stunning illustrations by Pete Williamson, her severe salt-and-pepper hair worn in a long pigtail that curls at the end just like a twitching cat’s tail). She was owned by a family which used to mistreat her, and she has a special hatred for children generally – and Barney in particular… The story of how Barney, with the help of his only friend, Rissa, tries to escape Miss Whipmire’s clutches and become a little boy again, is scarily good: dark and funny and completely unputdownable.

It was also great fun to write, admits Matt. “Probably the most fun I’ve had writing a book!”

He doesn’t have cats himself: he’s waiting until his children – Lucas, four, and Pearl, two – are old enough not to be tempted to pull their tails. But he grew up with cats. “And I’ve always felt they are more mysterious than dogs.”

The moral of his tale is simple: be careful what you wish for in front of a cat. “They might become your headteacher!”

Perhaps most worrying of all, his own mum is a headteacher, at a primary school in Nottinghamshire where he grew up. As far as Matt knows, however, she didn’t begin life as a cat…

To Be A Cat by Matt Haig was published this week in hardback by The Bodley Head, priced £10.99. It is suitable for children aged nine and upwards.

Matt will be at Waterstones in York at 3pm on March 31 to sign copies of the book and talk about writing as part of the York Literature Festival.