Cats of the World by Hannah Shaw and Andrew Marttila

Hannah Shaw is the Kitten Lady, the rescuer who taught half the internet how to bottle-feed neonatal kittens, and Andrew Marttila is her husband and a professional cat photographer. For this book they traveled to thirty countries and came back with hundreds of photographs and stories of cats living everywhere humans do: street cats, island cats, market cats, cats with entire neighborhoods organized around them. It became an instant New York Times bestseller, and it earned that the honest way.

Most cat coffee table books are filler: stock photos, thin captions, done. This one is reported. Shaw and Marttila rescue and rehabilitate cats for a living, so the writing carries real knowledge about how cats and people actually coexist across cultures, and Marttila's portraits catch personality instead of just cuteness. It is the cat book for someone who already owns cat books and is tired of them. Give it to the person whose phone camera roll is 80 percent their cat, or to anyone who follows rescue accounts and wants the deeper version of that world on paper.