Kate Cayley

Property

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.