by Kate Cayley
The day begins ordinarily, and by evening, someone is dead.
Property takes place over the course of a single spring day in an uneasily gentrifying urban neighbourhood, through several points of view, including Nat, a queer mother of two, the younger Maddy, a failed actress and stay-at-home mum, with whom Nat has an unstable and competitive friendship, and Ilya, a young man working on the renovation of a derelict house next door to Maddy’s following a catastrophic accident at an industrial building site.
Paths cross and re-cross on the small network of streets. People shop for groceries, have small and ambiguously fraught interactions with their neighbours, take their children to buy treats, work on draining the flooding basement of an old house. A group of men drink beer on a porch. A lonely man wanders. Children observe adults without the adults noticing. Threats are suspected, never from the right place. As the tension builds, the water rises in the basement of the old house, and conflicts of personality, privilege, and past history explode.
Property is a literary novel that blends emotional complexity with elements of satire to explore class, environmental anxiety, the guilty navel-gazing of affluent liberals, marriage, queer respectability, friendship, the shifting identities of city neighbourhoods, loneliness, the real and imaginary perils of raising children, and the ways that we hurt one another without meaning to.
Publication: October 2025
Publisher:
Coach House Books
Rights sold:
- World: Coach House Books
“Beautifully bleak and ultimately tragic, Property’s sole consolation results from its own singular beauty, which is paradoxical in an account of the human condition that disturbs with such grim certitude.” –Quill and Quire
“Cayley masterfully renders each character’s inner world, showing how their fears and prejudices are amplified by loneliness. It’s an unflinching tale of a community’s fragile bonds.” –Publishers Weekly
“Holy crap! What a novel. It’s about a day but also about deep time. About knowing your neighbours and not having the least clue about your neighbours — or, frankly, your loved ones. Keenly observed, superbly crafted, taut, surprising, unflinching, tender, sharply circumscribed and truly expansive, Property is a wonder.” –Anne Fleming, author of Curiosities: A Novel
“Kate Cayley’s Property is both minutely observed and movingly kaleidoscopic, a meditation on fate, accident, free will, and of the elusive and illusive qualities of selfhood. Its questions and hopes—layered into a single day on a single street—are a living, breathing presence.” –Madeleine Thien, author of The Book of Records