LIKE A HOUSE ON FIRE

From prize-winning short-story writer Cate Kennedy comes a new collection to rival her highly acclaimed Dark Roots. In LIKE A HOUSE ON FIRE, Kennedy once again takes ordinary lives and dissects their ironies, injustices and pleasures with her humane eye and wry sense of humour. Her poignant short stories find the beauty and tragedy in illness and mortality, life and love.

Cate Kennedy is the author of the highly acclaimed novel The World Beneath, which won the People's Choice Award in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards in 2010. She is an award-winning short-story writer whose work has been published widely. Her first collection, Dark Roots, was shortlisted for the Steele Rudd Award in the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards and for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. She is also the author of a travel memoir, Sing, and Don't Cry, and the poetry collections Joyflight, Signs of Other Fires and The Taste of River Water, which won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Poetry in 2011.

"Cate Kennedy's anger is a cleansing fire. Her stories ache with small mercies - tender, life-affirming, real." - Hilary McPhee
"One of the world's finest short-story writers." - Robert Drewe
"Cate Kennedy writes with the warm understanding and cold precision of a
master." - David Malouf