With drawings by Mike Cowdrey, who now lives in Finland, Operation Catflap was written by Worstead-based children’s author Peter Tye.
 
With more than 200 pages the story is aimed at seven-to-nine year olds and contains over 100 black-and-white illustrations, mostly of garden birds.
 
The central character is Razzdazz Oriole (“everyone calls me Razz”), a bird with magical powers who lives in seven-year-old Leo’s garden.
 
In the run-up to Christmas, Leo breaks his promise to feed the birds while his grandfather is away.
 
Leo then receives a nocturnal visit from Razz, who turns him into a robin and takes him out into the frozen garden to meet the other birds to share their struggle for survival.
 
Following some feather-raising encounters and faced with the prospect of falling off his perch on the coldest night of the winter, Leo devises a plan to overcome the physical limitations of being a robin.
 
With the help of his cat, Monty, and Sophie, one of his mother’s brown hens (who turns out to be multilingual), Leo manages to get the desperately needed food out from the house and into the garden, where his new-found friends are anxiously waiting.
 
Operation Catflap (October 2019, ISBN: 978-10-81964-93-1) is available from amazon.co.uk: paperback £6.94; Kindle edition £2.34.
 
Peter Tye is the author of the Little Red Tractor stories, Toliman the Barn Owl, Crocodile Tours, Bee Keeping for Cats, Badman: The Ghost of King John and other children’s books.
 
For more information, telephone: 01692 535047 or email: mail@petertye.co.uk or visit his website.