Book about a girl who can communicate telepathically with an orange cat

Question

I’ve been looking for a certain book now for at least 5 years. It was a hardcover edition, with a mostly grey cover and a girl with an orange cat sitting. The book’s setting was in an apocalypse, or post-apocalyptic setting.

• The story was about a girl, or a child, who could telepathically communicate with her orange cat.
• Then she later was taken to doctors who performed experiments on her. (I don’t know if this was my imagination or not)
• The book couldn’t have been published after 2016. it was a long time ago I saw it, but my mother didn’t let my buy the book.

I specifically remember the cover. it was white or light grey, with an orange cat. I remember specifically an orange cat. like a housecat, not a lion.

Answer 1

Could this be Obernewtyn by Isobelle Carmody (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6504788-obernewtyn)? The story takes place in a post apocalyptic world (the world has been devastated by nuclear winter), the main character is a girl, Elspeth Gordie, capable of telepathic communication with her cat Maruman (and a variety of other psychic powers), and she is taken away from her orphanage home, declared a Misfit (i.e. a mutant) and sent to a new home at the remote Obernewtyn. The only issue is that I cannot find a version where Maruman is depicted as orange - he is usually depicted as grey or tabby.

As pointed out in the comments below, there is an edition with Maruman depicted as orange, in an omnibus comprising the first two books in the series (Obernewtyn and The Farseekers):

Answer 2

Partial match: The Universe Against Her by James H. Schmitz (1964).

The girl and her telepathic cat are here, as well as some government experimenting. What wouldn't match is that the orange feline depicted on the cover is larger than your common housecat.

From Goodreads:

Telzey Amberdon, at age 15, had enormously developed psionic powers. She could read, as well as change, human minds! In part I, she enjoys an extraordinary telepathic rapport with a feline non-human.

Then her dreams become nightmares dominated by a weird "psionic traffic cop," and she realizes that further exercise of her powers could lead to trouble. Somehow, the interstellar government had found out about her, and had planted that "cop" in her mind to destroy her.

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Found with the Google query scifi book apocalypse telepathic cat site:goodreads.com/book and browsing the results from the Images search.

Answer 3

Finders-Seekers, by Gayle Greeno seems to match a number of elements that you remember.

Their technological resources destroyed, a colonizing expedition from Earth has been stranded on the world of Methuen for over two hundred years. Their continued survival is largely due to the organization of healers known as the Eumedicos and to the Seekers Veritas, a unique group composed of pairs of Bondmates, one human and one ghatti—a telepathic catlike being native to Methuen who bonds with a specific human for life. These Bondmates travel from town to town, settling disputes by truth-reading the minds and emotions of plaintiffs and defendants. While most people respect the Seekers, there are those who fear the ghatti powers. And now someone has begun attacking Seeker pairs.

What no one knows is that this destroyer has targeted one specific pair of Bondmates as special victims—the woman Doyce and the ghatta Khar'pern. For the key to defeating this deadly foe is locked away in Doyce's mind behind barriers even her ghattas has never been able to break down.

This seems to hit on a number of your main points. The cover has a girl and an orange cat. (There's also a gray tabby cat, which is a strike against it.) The girl and the cat are telepathically linked. The setting is a colony planet that's lost its technology, so that's a possible match to your post-apocalyptic setting. The woman and her cat are being targeted and hunted.

Unlike the book you remember, the main character of this one seems to be a woman, not a young girl. And the summary blurb doesn't mention experiments or doctors.

Answer 4

Could this be On Basilisk Station by David Weber?

Nimitz, the large treecat who befriends Honor Harrington, is a fixture in the Honorverse. Although Laughs Brightly initially had no desire to adopt a human, his encounter with Honor when he saved her from peak bears on the planet Sphinx—being injured in the melee—caused him to bond with her immediately. She named him Nimitz, and the two formed a unique pairing, able to share their vision via their telepathic link. Anyone seeking to harm Honor knows they have to eliminate or incapacitate Nimitz somehow—and that isn’t an easy task.

^{-from The 25 Best Cats in Sci-Fi and Fantasy}

This quotation seems to mostly match what you described, and the cover of the particular edition linked above seems to match your description.

Answer 5

My first thought was Catalyst by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. There was no apocalypse, though the world the book starts out on is pretty primitive, relatively speaking.