- Property
- How You Were Born
- Lent
- Householders
- Other Houses
- When This World Comes to an End
- Hangman in the Mirror
Property
Novel
Coach House Books, 2025
A spring day in a 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.
- Shortlist, Amazon Canada First Novel Award, 2026
- Shortlist, Toronto Book Award, 2026
- Finalist, Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Literary Fiction, 2025
How You Were Born
Stories
10th anniversary reissue, Book*hug Press, 2024
Originally published by Pedlar Press, 2014
This tenth-anniversary edition of Kate Cayley’s award-winning collection includes three new stories.
A young mother intrudes into 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.
With a foreword by Alayna Munce and a preface by the author.
- Trillium Book Award, 2015
- Finalist, Governor General’s Award for Fiction, 2015
- Longlist, Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, 2015
- Shortlist, ReLit Award, 2015
Lent
Poems
Book*hug Press, 2023
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, and moments. The grotesque and the tedious, the baroque and the 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 the warnings of strangers; these are interspersed with depictions such as Mary Shelley recalling the monster, the inner life of a seventeenth century portrait sitter, and Ted Hughes’s second wife telling her story to the dead Sylvia Plath. The title section explores religious faith; how belief is itself a repetition, a slow accumulation over time, just like love or forgiveness.
Lent is an exquisite work of our era, asking us to contemplate what it means to live in a broken world—and why we still find it beautiful.
- Longlist, Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry, 2024
- Finalist, Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, 2023
Householders
Stories
Biblioasis, 2021
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.
- Finalist, Firecracker Award for Fiction
- CBC and Quill and Quire Most Anticipated
- Lambda Most Anticipated LGBTQIA+
- 49th Shelf Book of the Year
Other Houses
Poems
Brick Books, 2017
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. Each of these poems unfolds with the sweep and precision of a compressed novel.
When This World Comes to an End
Poems
Brick Books, 2013
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? A book of poems about lost moments of history, photographs, and folktales
Shortlist, ReLit Award, 2014
The Hangman in the Mirror
Young Adult Novel
Annick Press, 2011
Françoise Laurent has never had an easy life. 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 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?
Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction, 2012