Most Popular Books by Kate Cayley

First published in 2014, this tenth-anniversary edition of the award-winning collection includes three new stories. A young mother intrudes in the life of an older woman, thinking she knows what''s best. An academic becomes convinced that he is haunted by his double. Two children spy on their supposedly criminal neighbours. A man enables his cousin''s predatory impulses out of loyalty, and a circus performer dreams of a perfect wedding. These characters fail despite their best intentions and continue on despite their failures. The stories in How You Were Born, each more incisive and devastating than the last, examine the difficult business of love, loyalty, and memory. Sharing the bizarre and tragi-comic of life--whether in present-day Toronto or in small towns of the early 20th century--Cayley champions the importance of connections, even when missed or mislaid, and the possibility of redemption.

A 2022 Firecracker Award for Fiction Finalist • A CBC Books and Quill & Quire Anticipated Fall Book • A Lambda Literary Most Anticipated LGBTQIA+ Title • A 49th Shelf Book of the Year 2021 Linked short stories about families, nascent queers, and self-deluded utopians explore the moral ordinary strangeness in their characters’ overlapping lives. A woman impersonates a nun online, with unexpected consequences. In a rapidly changing neighborhood, tensions escalate around two events planned for the same day. The barista girlfriend of a tech billionaire survives a zombie apocalypse only to face spending her life with the paranoid super-rich. The linked stories in Householders move effortlessly from the commonplace to the fantastic, from west-end Toronto to a trailer in the middle of nowhere, from a university campus to a state-of-the-art underground bunker; from a commune in the woods to a city and back again. Exploring the ordinary strangeness in the lives of recurring characters and overlapping dramas, Householders combines the intimacy, precision, and clarity of short fiction with the depth and reach of a novel and mines the moral hazards inherent in all the ways we try and fail to save one another and ourselves.

Françoise Laurent has never had an easy life. The only surviving child of a destitute washerwoman and wayward soldier, she must rely only on herself to get by. When her parents die suddenly from the smallpox ravishing New France (modern-day Montreal), Françoise sees it as a chance to escape the life she thought she was trapped in. Seizing her newfound opportunity, Françoise takes a job as an aide to the wife of a wealthy fur trader. The poverty-ridden world she knew transforms into a strange new world full of privilege and fine things — and of never having to beg for food. But Françoise’s relationships with the other servants in Madame Pommereau’s house are tenuous, and Madame Pommereau isn’t an easy woman to work for. When Françoise is caught stealing a pair of her mistress’s beautiful gloves, she faces a future even worse than she could have imagined: thrown in jail, she is sentenced to death by hanging. Once again, Françoise is left to her own devices to survive ... Is she cunning enough to convince the prisoner in the cell beside her to become the hangman and marry her, which, by law, is the only thing that could save her life? Based on an actual story and filled with illuminating historical detail, THE HANGMAN IN THE MIRROR transports readers to the harsh landscape of a new land that is filled with even harsher class divisions and injustices.

In these peculiar times, we are thrust back into ourselves in a kind of suspension: one in which only private life exists yet threatens to become trivial through a sense of mutual, overarching dread. Lent from award-winning writer Kate Cayley is built from this tension, exploring domestic and artistic life amidst the environmental crisis, and the surprising ways that every philosophical quandary--large and small--converges in the home, in small objects, conversations, moments. Grotesque and tedious, baroque and banal intertwine in the first three sections. Meticulous depictions of spectacle run into the repetition of daily domestic life: trying to explain time to children, day trips to the planetarium and strangers'' warnings, intersperse depictions of Mary Shelley recalling the monster, the inner life of a Seventeenth Century portrait sitter, Ted Hughes'' second wife telling her story to the dead Sylvia Plath, Rusalski--souls of drowned innocents in the lake. The final, title section, explores religious faith; how belief is itself a repetition, a slow accumulation over time, just like love or forgiveness.

Poetry. In OTHER HOUSES, Kate Cayley''s second collection of poetry, objects are alive with the presence of the people who have handled them. Myths and legends are interwoven with daily life. Visionaries, mystics, charlatans, artists, and the dead speak to us like chatty neighbours. An imaginary library catalogues missing people. Reading becomes a way of remembering the dead. Home is an elsewhere we are "called to," a mystery that impels children to wander off, and adults to grow in unexpected directions. Cayley couples a rich, meaty lyricism with the intimacy of direct address, creating a poetry that is at once embodied and spectral. She directs us to wonder, "Did light and dark have a taste and texture, like food?" At the same time, her command of voice and narrative is masterful--each of these poems unfolds with the sweep and precision of a compressed novel. "Beware of Kate Cayley. With an agility stolen from some other world she flicks this one open and invites us to watch our certainties scuttling away. Predatory and unsettling, these exquisitely crafted poems suggest that we are at our most human when yearning to reach beyond the visible."--Martha Baillie

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. The local residents go about their daily routines: Nat, a middle-aged queer mother of two, feigns normalcy as she worries about her daughter and her taciturn, loner son locked in his room upstairs. Her friend Maddy, a failed actress and fellow parent, and her husband plan to go to Nat''s for dinner. Next door, Ilya, still recovering from a gruesome industrial accident, is struggling to renovate a fixer-upper, but a buried stream keeps threatening to flood the basement. The troubled residents stumble through their errands and to-do lists, but each seemingly inconsequential exchange tightens in around the neighbourhood, until finally tragedy strikes, leaving it forever changed. With crystalline prose that balances emotional complexity and a hint of satire, Property explores the thorniness of class and privilege in a city stretched to the breaking point. The novel shows the complicated politics of queer respectability, friendship, the real and imaginary perils of raising children, and the ways that we hurt one another without meaning to.

Poetry. Kate Cayley''s is a mind both studious and curious, deeply attuned to the question "what if?" What if Nick Drake and Emily Dickinson met in the afterlife? What if a respected physician suddenly shrank to the size of a pea? What if the blind twins in a Victorian photograph could speak to us? What if we found another Earth orbiting another sun? Cayley draws on her experience as a playwright to create vividly engaging voices and characters ranging from the famous to the infamous to the all-but-anonymous. With exquisite pacing and striking imagery she draws us into the gaps in history, invites us to survey its wonders, both real and imaginary. "Skillfully deploying a diction both lithe and lapidary, Kate Cayley''s first collection regales the reader with conjurations of psyches diverse as those of Judas Iscariot and Simone Weil, Daguerreotype cameos and cautionary tales, apocalyptic stories and feminist fables--all brimming with revelations and wonder."--Ruth Roach Pierson