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. From a university campus to an underground bunker, a commune in the woods to Toronto and back again, the linked stories in Householders move effortlessly between the commonplace and the fantastic. In deft and exacting narratives about difficult children and thorny friendships, hopeful revolutionaries and self-deluded utopians, nascent queers, sincere frauds, and families of all kinds, Kate Cayley mines the moral hazards inherent in the ways we try to save each other and ourselves.
- Editorial comps/influences include Tessa Hadley's Bad Dreams and Other Stories, Yiyun Li's A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, and Deborah Willis' Vanishing and other stories, along with the work of Alice Munro and Barbara Gowdy. Cayley is similarly interested in how domestic or private space brushes up against the public and political.
- Contemporary themes/interests: queer domesticity, gentrification, and religious extremism, partiularly faith-based utopian experiments. Cayley is also interested in borders/borderlands: stories in Householders travel across national borders, exploring the shared experiences of North Americans
- Cayley has been shortlisted for numerous Canadian awards across mulitple genres, including the K. M. Hunter Award for Literature in, the CBC Short Story Prize, the ReLit Award for Short Fiction in 2015, and the Governor General's Award for Fiction.
- Blurbs expected from Souvankham Thammavongsa, David Bergen, Madeleine Thien.
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