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The Black Cat in the Back Row
Paperback
General FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher: One Fifteen Press
Published: Jul 24 2026
Pages: 94
Weight: 0.26
Height: 0.23 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Antonio Vinoverde has taught economics on winter evenings for thirty years, and lately he can no longer tell whether any of it has mattered.
Then, on a snowy January night, a small black cat appears in the back row of his class - a cat exactly like the one asleep on his windowsill half an hour away, and one that only he seems to truly notice. Night after night it returns, sitting in on the lecture, watching the students Antonio had stopped really seeing: the young woman who apologizes before every question, the man who comes straight from a long shift, the student who is always a step ahead of the room and a step behind its language.
As the cat leads him - through a storm, up a staircase that should not exist, and into rooms he was never meant to enter - Antonio is drawn back toward the question he had almost stopped asking: whether a teacher is ever allowed to know what his work becomes.
Tender, quietly magical, and gently funny, The Black Cat in the Back Row is an illustrated novella about attention, doubt, and the people who carry us farther than we will ever see. For anyone who has loved a teacher, a cat, or a winter classroom, it is a small book about the quiet ways a life adds up.
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