Fat Lawrence

Laurence Higgins, an enormously fat black cat, has breakfast with Mrs Higgins, lunch with the Normans, tea with old Mr Mason and supper with the Barclay-Lloyds. None of them know why he is so fat on just one meal a day! Lawrence is happy until he finds the walking from house to house tiring and begins to get indigestion. His friends tell him to lose weight if he wants a girl friend so he begins to spend one day in four with all his owners. He gets thinner but the cat he fancies down the road tells him she doesn't like slim boys - she's lost her heart to an enormously fat black cat she used to see up the road! Triumphantly Lawrence returns to his four meals a day, spurred on by the thought of meeting Bella when he's back to his normal size.

Dick King-Smith served in the Grenadier Guards during the Second World War, and afterwards spent twenty years as a farmer in Gloucestershire, the county of his birth. Many of his stories are inspired by his farming experiences. Later he taught at a village primary school. His first book, The Fox Busters, was published in 1978. He wrote a great number of children's books, including The Sheep-Pig (winner of the Guardian Award and filmed as Babe), Harry's Mad, Noah's Brother, The Hodgeheg, Martin's Mice, Ace, The Cuckoo Child and Harriet's Hare (winner of the Children's Book Award in 1995). At the British Book Awards in 1991 he was voted Children's Author of the Year. In 2009 he was made OBE for services to children's literature. Dick King-Smith died in 2011 at the age of eighty-eight.