Householders

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

A 2022 Firecracker Award for Fiction Finalist A CBC Books and Quill & Quire Anticipated Fall Book A Lambda Literary Most Anticipated LGBTQIA+ Title A49th Shelf Book of the Year2021

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.

Reviews

Praise forHouseholders

A book that so assiduously interrogates notions of identity and belonging ... Cayleys language is precise and evocative ... Each of the collections storiesfrom Pilgrims, about a woman who impersonates a nun online to find sympathy for her difficult domestic situation, to the stunning opener, The Crooked Mancontains writing that impresses with its barbed acidity as much as its clear-eyed observation ... The lambent prose frequently belies the emotional heft of the stories, which creep up on a reader.
Quill & Quire, starred review

"I devoured this book. I hoovered it; I let its sorrow, its wonder, its yearning, swirl in the vacuum bag of my chest cavity. On every page there is so much honesty, insight, so much complex understanding."
Anne Fleming, Xtra Magazine

"Kate Cayley showcases virtuosic writing and captivating settings alongside intriguing plots that are handled with marked assurance from beginning to end ... More than reflecting sheer invention or technical mastery, the stories are anchored by multi-faceted characters reacting to or navigating unique practical and ethical dilemmas, which Cayley investigates with a thoughtful thoroughness."
Plenitude

"What Cayley has a gift for is getting into the minds and, more importantly, the hearts of characters far from the usual and revealing their humanity with a gentle incisiveness."
Maple Tree Literary Supplement

"Cayley writes with a passion that seems to extend that longed-for forgiveness to her characters when they cannot bring themselves to do it for themselves."
Memphis Flyer

It would be something of a shame to read any of these stories individually, or to read them just once through, as moving outside and around them is one of the pleasures of this text. Householders is not a collection about the singular self, but about the individual uneasily negotiating subjectivity in a manner that is intrinsically relational; and appropriately, the narratives seem to continue into and across one another, propelled by differences that underscore their symmetries."
Full-Stop Magazine

The stories in Householders are haunting and enigmatic, with a clarity of emotion that cuts through the dreamlike atmosphere Cayley has crafted ... With incredible attention to the nuance of interpersonal relationshipswhether familial, romantic, situational, dysfunctionaleach story in Householders is a window into an eerie but wonderful world.
Fawn Parker, 49th Shelf

You dont have to come from a foreign country to be a stranger in your land. Cayleys haunting short stories weave together stealthily, gentle until the cosh strikes your skull Brutally, beautifully lyrical.
Lavender Magazine

Full of startling turns of phrase and evocative descriptions ... Cayleys background as a poetshe has published two collections of poetryshines ... With Householders, Cayley has envisioned a world that mirrors our own like a distorted funhousea place where the moral and physical stakes are heightened, where emotional bonds run deeply, and where something menacing is often lurking. Its a frightening world, but it makes for a compelling story collection, as good to tear through for the narrative as it is to savor (and savor again) for the language.
ZYZZYVA

Literally took my breath away Kate Cayley is splendid in her deft arrangement of the sentence, and in her depiction of the quotidian but just askew enough to be new and surprising. These stories are rich, absorbing, and oh so satisfying, and I predict this as one of the big books of the fall literary season.
Kerry Clare, Pickle Me This

"Cayleys ability to create characters that fascinate is something to behold."
Anne Logan, I've Read This

"Reading each story in Kate Cayleys Householders is like entering a household, one that is unique in its treasured secrets and hidden corners of glory and shame. The inhabitantsa trio of aging hippies, a blogger masquerading as a nun, a group of traumatized escapees from a fanatical commune, a washed-up but still brilliant musicianare all seekers after whatever good life, or good death, they can find. Having met them, the reader is left with a lingering sense of responsibility, as for worrisome old friends who are loved in spite of themselves."
KD Miller, Scotiabank Giller Prize-nominated author of Late Breaking

"Taut and brimming with clarity."
Souvankham Thammavongsa, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author of How to Pronounce Knife

"Cayleys world is a dangerous place, all the structures built with discarded slivering wood and rusted nails, but one where strange sacredness arrives in the middle of the ordinary day. The mysterious reasons that push her misplaced, displaced people are as convincing as memories, painful but necessary to relive. Read these stories, youll be glad you did."
Marina Endicott, author of The Difference

"Reading each story in Kate CayleysHouseholdersis like entering a household, one that is unique in its treasured secrets and hidden corners of glory and shame. The inhabitantsa trio of aging hippies, a blogger masquerading as a nun, a group of traumatized escapees from a fanatical commune, a washed-up but still brilliant musicianare all seekers after whatever good life, or good death, they can find. Having met them, the reader is left with a lingering sense of responsibility, as for worrisome old friends who are loved in spite of themselves."
K.D. Miller, Giller-nominated author ofLate Breaking

Praise for Kate Cayley

"Cayley illustrates our human desire for permanence, and the corresponding impermanence of the physical body. Other Houses weaves a rare complexity of contemplations through metaphor, shape-shifting, and philosophical considerations. Efficiently stated, Cayleys ideas are wise and well worth a read."
Quill & Quire

"When This World Comes to an End marks a captivating poetic debut for the busy writer ... Despite its breadth of history, When This World Comes to an End offers a succinct reflection of what has been and what will be. The purview of history is considered through known figures just as much as the insignificant acts of the everyday."
Toronto Review of Books

"Cayley shows us, in How You Were Born, that the impulse to collect and then work through anxiety imaginatively is important and powerful."
Cleaver Magazine

Author Bio

Kate Cayley has previously written a short story collection, two poetry collections, and a number of plays, both traditional and experimental, which have been produced in Canada and the US. She is a frequent writing collaborator with immersive company Zuppa Theatre. She has won the Trillium Book Award and an O. Henry Prize and been a finalist for the Governor Generals Award. She lives in Toronto with her wife and their three children.