For years, Tom Cox might have seemed like a regular, hard-living sort of bloke --a lover of late nights, rock music and beer -- but he had a dark, furry secret. Tom was a cat lover. For a while, he kept his passion in check, but there was only so long he could postpone his true dream, especially after he met Dee, his moggy-loving soulmate. He let London and his job as a rock critic behind, and he and Dee, her cat Janet and three new kittens, moved to a remote part of Norfolk. They thought it would be easy. They thought their cat madness had reached its limit. They were wrong.

In Under the Paw, Tom records the chaos of owning seven of the most charismatic, idiotic and duplicitous cats in the country. Suddenly on call around the clock for multiple sets of whiskers, Tom encounters death, depression, flying fur and the first human sentence spoken by a feline. Running through all the maelstrom is the heartbreaking story of his relationship with The Bear, his oldest cat: a 'painfully sensitive' survivor moggy who may or may not be an evil genius.