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PROPERTY

Kate Cayley

A Novel

A modern, class-conscious Mrs. Dalloway, this unsettling novel dissects common narratives of family and community, showing the fragile ties that hold us together.
A spring day in an average gentrifying neighbourhood begins unremarkably enough; by evening someone has died.

Nat, a middle-aged queer mother of two, feigns normalcy as she worries about her taciturn, loner son locked in his room. Her friend Maddy, a failed actress and fellow parent, frets over her missed opportunities and considers leaving her marriage. Next door, Ilya, a young construction worker, struggles to renovate a fixer-upper, but a buried stream threatens to flood the basement. An old woman eyes the street through the gap in her curtains. A lonely man wanders.

As the troubled residents stumble through their errands, navigating the thorniness of class and privilege, of queer respectability and friendship in an overstretched city, each seemingly inconsequential exchange tightens in around the neighbourhood, until finally tragedy strikes, leaving it forever changed.

Kate Cayley has previously published two short story collections and three collections of poetry, and her plays have been performed in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. She has won the Trillium Book Award, an O. Henry Prize, and the Mitchell Prize for Poetry, and been a finalist for the Governor General's Award for Fiction, among other awards. Her writing has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry, Best Canadian Stories, Brick, Electric Literature, Joyland, and The New Quarterly. She lives in Toronto.
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Published 2025-10-01 by Coach House Books

Comments

In this insistently particular and richly detailed portrait of a single street, Kate Cayley has captured the quiet dramas of our private lives, the contested spaces of our neighbourhoods, and the imperfect ways in which we try to understand one another. A wonderful and captivating novel, with a devastating shock at its heart.

Though Cayley's oeuvre is relatively small (two short-story collections, three poetry collections and plays), it has packed a big punch in the prizes department, having won the Trillium Book Award, the Mitchell Prize for Poetry, the O. Henry Short Story Prize and garnered several nominations. In her first novel, the lives of residents in a gentrifying Toronto neighbourhood intersect over a single spring day before culminating in a death foretold.

Sentence after remarkable sentence, Cayley's portrayal of a day in a neighbourhood simultaneously dazzles and induces a deep discomfort.

Kate Cayley's Property is both minutely observed and movingly kaleidoscopic, a meditation on fate, accident, free will, and of the elusive and illusive qualities of selfhood. Its questions and hopes layered into a single day on a single street are a living, breathing presence.

Holy crap! What a novel. It's about a day but also about deep time. About knowing your neighbours and not having the least clue about your neighbours or, frankly, your loved ones. Keenly observed, superbly crafted, taut, surprising, unflinching, tender, sharply circumscribed and truly expansive, Property is a wonder.

Cayley creates an environment in which everything has heightened meaning and in which no action or transgression, however small, is without potential consequence.

A day in the life of a Rube Gold-'burb, where all actions have an equal and opposite cul-de-saction; every child a potential bad seed, every adult heading for a minor nick or major cave-in. A fun and disturbing read, strong in characters, paced with perfect momentum, and its morbid heart residing in the right place.

Cayley masterfully renders each character's inner world, showing how their fears and prejudices are amplified by loneliness. It's an unflinching tale of a community's fragile bonds.

Sincere, unsettling, and intimate...keenly observant of characters' inner and outer worlds, Cayley's narration expands and dissolves, elongating time and blurring subjectivity...Property shows how it is our unspoken, intrinsic understanding of debts to one another that holds us accountable.