October 15, 2025
Property, by Kate Cayley
Property, the debut novel by the award-winner Cayley—who has previously published short fiction, poetry and plays—is set over a single day in west end Toronto, a contemporary riff on the Mrs. Dalloway arc with a little “Hurry up please it’s time” from “The Waste Land” thrown in for good measure, but it’s also unabashedly itself, rich and propulsive, the story of a neighbourhood and its motley crew of inhabitants including the rats scurrying around the very wet basement of a house under construction, and by the end of the day—we know from the start—somebody will be dead.
Property is the story of three mothers—Nat, a queer mother whose middle classness has crept up on her; Maddy, a former actress, who longs to escape her marriage; and the older woman across the street with her flickering curtain, one of the street’s long-time residents before people like Nat and Maddy moved in with their renos and lush strollers, who worries about her troubled adult son. It’s also the story of Ilya, Russian builder working on the excavated house, the lady smoking on the porch with her dog, Nat and Maddy’s children, and how not a single one of these characters’ inner lives is at all what the people around them imagine.
A novel about gentrification, community, secrets, fears and anxieties, about the unstable foundations at the base of so many of the stories we tell ourselves of who we are and what we’re becoming, Property, in all its delectable prose, fast becomes a heart-wrenching page-turner. The narrative culminates in an ending that manages to be inevitable, awful and perfect.
