Lean Cat, Savage Cat

A riotous and raunchy novel about a woman whose search for Romy Haag, one of David Bowie's former lovers, is sidelined when she falls into a deep obsession with a musician, who is often compared to Bowie, in pursuit of stardom

"Lean Cat, Savage Cat is the book that's been missing from my reading habits: classically glamourous, timelessly seductive. Lauren J. Joseph is a wit and an assassin from one sentence to the next" --Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby

Alone at a party, sipping her celery sour, Charli knows she's in a rut. Kicking around with the rest of London's bohemian dropouts, she has no idea what to do with her arts degree and her research project on Romy Haag--the transsexual disco singer and long-time lover of David Bowie--has all but stalled out. But her life takes a turn when she bumps into the mysterious Alexander Geist. Androgynously, glamorously handsome, he feels something like a soul mate, another love once lost and now found. Naturally, when he leaves for Berlin, Charli follows.

There, at the center of the city's febrile party scene, Charli and Alexander embark on their great project: turn Alexander into the greatest pop star since David Bowie. But Alexander is elusive, mercurial; Charli is in over her head before she realizes just how self-destructive her life has become under his spell.

Lean Cat, Savage Cat is Isherwood one-hundred years on, it's Nancy Mitford in the dark room, Bret Easton-Ellis amongst a raft of European low-lives scrabbling for success. It is the story of setting out in search of one thing and finding yourself in possession of something quite different, a book about obsession and excess, doppelgängers and disassociation, fame and fandom, the tyrannical return of unprocessed grief, and the terrible things we do to feel loved.

Author: Lauren J. Joseph
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 02/17/2026
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.60w x 1.40d
ISBN: 9781646223282


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 12/15/2025
Booklist 12/01/2025
Kirkus Reviews 01/01/2026

About the Author
LAUREN J. JOSEPH (formerly La JohnJoseph) is a British born American-educated artist and writer, who works at the intersection of video, text, and live performance. She has written extensively on contemporary culture, art, performance, pornography, gender theory and the Golden Age of Hollywood, contributing in print and online to publications including iD, The Independent, Sleek, The Guardian, Time Out, Attitude, Amuse, Siegessäule, Parterre de Rois, Charleston Press, and the 'zines Birdsong, Fat Zine, 21st Century Queer Artists Identify Themselves, and Not Here: An Anthology of Queer Loneliness. She has also authored the experimental prose work Everything Must Go (ITNA Press in 2014), and the plays, A Generous Lover and Boy in a Dress, which were published by Oberon in 2019. She has presented performances at the Royal Opera House; Deutsche Oper; Bristol Old Vic; Barbican; Schaubühne; Art Basel Hong Kong; SF MoMA; Dixon Place, NY; Martin-Gropius Bau; Fancy Him, Tokyo; La Java, Paris; and Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói. Her fine artwork has been shown in group exhibitions in the UK, US, Germany and Mexico.