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The Licking: A Novel of First Contact
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Mar 2 2026
Pages: 246
Weight: 0.67
Height: 0.61 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
THE LICKING
Mara Voss notices things. She notices, for instance, that her cat Biscuit pauses for exactly fifteen seconds before his 3:17am grooming session - the same fifteen seconds, every single night, with the precision of a machine.
She films it. She keeps a folder called misc. She starts asking questions.
She is not the only one.
In New Mexico, an astronomer has been tracking an unexplained signal bouncing off the lunar far side for six years. In Vermont, a retired biologist has quietly catalogued a compound in cat saliva that has no biological purpose he can identify. In Washington, an intelligence analyst has built a threat model around a pattern no one else believes is a pattern.
They are all correct.
What they have found, together, is this: Earth's cats are not what they appear to be. They never have been. For ten thousand years - since the first domestication, since the first cardboard box marked Free Kittens - something has been paying very close attention to us.
And it is almost finished.
The Licking is a novel about curiosity and grief, about what it means to be witnessed, and about what you do when the universe turns out to be far stranger - and far more attentive - than anyone expected. It is also, inevitably, about a cat named Biscuit, and the woman who noticed the pause, and what it meant that she did.
Perfect for readers of Andy Weir, Becky Chambers, and Emily St. John Mandel.
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