A Song for Wildcats

by Caitlin Galway

An arresting, vividly imaginative collection of stories, each capturing the complexity of intimacy and wounded inner worlds.

In “The Lyrebird’s Bell,” infatuation and violence grow between girls in the enchanting wilderness of post-war Australia, as they escape their families by spinning disturbed fantasies. The title story follows the passionate bond between two young men in the midst of the 1968 French student revolts, while they navigate — and at times resist — the philosophical and emotional nature of love. In “The Islanders,” an orphaned boy and his estranged aunt are thrown suddenly together, on a quiet peninsula, at the height of the Irish Troubles — with their deeply rooted fear and anger attracting the attention of shape-shifting phantoms of war.

All five long-form stories are uncanny portraits of pained resilience, from a voice defined by its unique beauty, insight, and resonance.

A RARE MACHINES BOOK

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Canada, Literary Fiction

240 pages, Paperback

Published June 3, 2025

About the author

Caitlin Galway is a Canadian novelist and short fiction writer. She has received and been shortlisted for numerous prizes, and her work has appeared in journals and anthologies across North America.

Reviews

[Jillian B · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a collection of beautifully written long-form stories set in different times and places. My favourite was “The Lyrebird’s Bell,” where two young girls in the Australian outback deal with parental abuse. There’s something haunting and sort of ambiguously magical about these stories. Overall, I enjoyed this collection a lot.

[Lau ♡]

DNF at 60%

From the moment I started reading this, I knew it wasn’t going to be for me. The writing style was too lyrical for my taste, which isn't something bad, but it didn’t let me appreciate the story. A lot of people are praising the writing style because it spoke to them. But that’s the thing about unique writing styles: they don’t work for everyone.

I’d have dnfed it right there, but I felt it wouldn’t be fair to dnf an ARC after reading one page. But I should have, because I wasn’t really connecting with the story because of that. I tried and kind of succeeded to be invested in the first one, but after that one I was just lost. It didn’t help that I wasn’t in the right mood to read about the type of triggering themes that were portrayed here, like abusive relationships and rape. The fact that I didn’t like how the writing style blended reality and magical/paranormal elements to explain the grief also didn’t work for me.

Overall, I would recommend giving this a try if you want a collection of short stories that explore the theme of grief from different perspectives, with a lyrical writing and a bit of magical realism/paranormal elements. I’d recommend trying a sample to see if you like the writing style because, as I said before, I knew from the first page it wasn’t going to be for me, but other readers loved it.


I kindly received an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Song for Wildcats by Caitlin Galway completely stole my heart, and I still can’t stop thinking about it. This collection of five fantastical stories pulled me in from the very first line and never let go. Each tale places you right in the center of its world—no lengthy backstory, no slow introductions—just immediate immersion into the minds of its unforgettable characters.

The descriptive and narrative prose throughout this collection is stunning. Caitlin’s writing is effortlessly elegant, yet unafraid to tackle heavy, often painful themes. She has this rare gift of crafting sentences that feel both ethereal and grounded—pulling you between fantasy and reality in a way that makes you question which is which.

There were many moments while reading where her words transcended the page entirely. I found myself transported—sometimes wandering through worlds haunted by ghosts, other times enchanted by fairies. Yet no matter how whimsical the setting, each story remained rooted in deeply human experiences. Beneath the magic are stories about grief, rage, sorrow, and moments that shocked me into stillness.

Caitlin Galway’s prose is some of the most lyrical and mesmerizing I’ve read in quite some time. Every page feels deliberate and poetic, yet incredibly raw. This is the kind of book that lingers—whispering back to you long after you’ve finished.

I’m so grateful to Rare Machines and the author for granting me early access to this gem, which is expected to be published on June 3, 2025. A Song for Wildcats is easily one of the most evocative and thought-provoking collections I’ve read, and I cannot recommend it enough for those who love stories that blur the lines between beauty and heartbreak.

[Clara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to Rare Machines for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley.

Overall, a solid collection of stories. The writing was definitely the most impressive part for me—deeply lyrical and expressive in each story. The stories also generally had strong sense of place. I liked some of the stories better than others, but that’s the name of the game in a collection like this. Unfortunately the genre / themes of stories weren’t really my cup of tea. I would settle on a 3.5 rounded up to 4 stars. I’ll include my notes for each story below.

story 1 (A Song For Wildcats)
densely written—packed with lush description, very tactile. aching with tenderness.

story 2 (Heatstroke)
provocative imagery, but the prose is less purple. diet death valley vibes.

story 3 (the Islanders)
also great writing here. a bit long, and not really my preferred setting as im not a big fan of a historical (not that it’s set that long ago lol). but very touching and fierce.

story 4 (the Wisp)
had a very ethereal feel to it. reminded me of a river enchanted.

story 5 (the lyrebird’s bell)
a lyrical examination of grief and abuse through a child’s perspective.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disclaimer: I received an e-ARC from netgalley.

A short story collection of five tragic and dark stories filled with grief and trauma. The writing is lyrical and expressive and I really enjoyed it. I also liked the historical insights these stories provided and how each short story painted a clear picture of the place and time it was set in, which made the stories feel quite real. The main characters are another high point of the stories, often overtaken by emotions as they deal with dark experiences and struggle to find connection. Despite the darkness these short stories explore, I enjoyed that it also always tried to show that at least some joy could still be found.
All in all I really enjoyed this anthology and if you like an exploration of queer life (in these cases gay and lesbian lives specifically) in unsupportive places, complex family dynamics and people dealing with trauma and grief in a variety of ways.

A Song for Wildcats: A short story about a young queer man in the late 1960s, whose relationship with another man at college was discovered and lead to his exile. Examines the overlap between being forced to be secretive about your love because of external forces and the way it enables abuse to flourish. Heartbreaking, focused on recovery with an open end. Tragic, but beautiful.
TW: physical and sexual abuse, dissociation, homophobia, self-harm, rape

Heatstroke: A short story about a young woman traveling, caught in a loop of dreams and foggy memories. The beginning had me guessing what was going on a lot and I struggled a bit with the way the story was told, but the end broke my heart and reframed a lot of it in a way I enjoyed. Less poetically written than the first story, but I felt that worked well.
TW: mention of domestic abuse, rape

The Islanders: Another story set in the late 1960s focusing on Belfast and riots happening there during this time. We follow a boy and his aunt as they try to find a way to grieve the loss of a sister and a mother and forge a new connection, but keep hurting each other instead. Grief corrodes everything it touches in here and I really enjoyed especially the first part of the story and would have loved for the haunting horror of it to be explored a bit more deeply or this story to be extended so the ending feels more satisfying, but I still quite liked it.
TW: body horror, death of parent, drowning, gore, violence, war

The Wisp: The death of a friend from her past causes a young woman to return to the small town in the Irish countryside she left behind at 18. As she remembers the small cruelties and deep intimacies that shaped their friendship and reconnects with other people from her past, she befriends a strange young girl that lives in town now. Interesting and strange, I enjoyed this story a lot.
TW: bullying, death

The Lyrebird’s Bell: A gothic haunting tale of two young girls with troubled homelives and pasts filled with lies in the Australian wilderness as they tell each other dark tales (that might just be horrible truths or might not). Haunting, but a bit too long and repetitive to fully grasp my attention when compared to the other stories in this anthology. I still liked the setting a lot and the relationship between the two girls.
TW: addiction, domestic abuse, eating disorder, murder, war

[Madison Dillon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! I am blown away! Unsurprisingly, Caitlin Galway has written a beautiful, memorable collection of stories. A Song for Wildcats features five stories full of magic, mystery, and intrigue. There is so much emotion strung throughout these pieces. Caitlin writes about love, but also about death and the grief which comes from that.

As human beings, we know that love isn’t the only thing which exists in different ways—grief does as well. Grieving your best friend is a different grief than grieving your sibling, and grieving your sibling is different than grieving your parent. Caitlin explores the different types of grief in such beautiful and raw ways, which really expose our human behaviour(s). While doing this, readers can see the loving relationships in these characters’ lives, but those relationships aren’t perfect, mimicking the reality (and beauty) of human relationships in our own lives.

It’s apparent that this collection is full of love and care; it’s more than just a story collection. It’s bound with precision and purpose. Caitlin’s writing is lyrical, purposeful, and expertly crafted—every word has its place. Caitlin is a very hardworking writer, and this comes across strongly on the page. The characters have life and backstory—places they’ve been and places they want to go.

The landscapes have their own vibrancy which come alive in your mind and on the page. There is culture and uniqueness and settings described in such a way that makes me want to stop everything and visit the hills, beaches, and deserts described within these pages. This is a book you’ll want to return to on a cold winter’s night for warmth, on a hot summer’s day for comfort, during the long rainy nights of spring, or the cool, hollowed-grey skies of autumn. A Song for Wildcats will become a classic on your shelf. 5/5 ✨.

[Not Sarah Connor Writes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to River Street Writing for sending me this in exchange for an honest review!

This was such a strong collection of stories. I loved the themes of coming to know oneself after facing adversity as well as Galway's sheet talent of taking reader's through different settings, time periods, with such fully-formed characters.

Read the full review on my blog!

Also, I am more active on Storygraph now so if you want to see what I'm read right away, follow me there!

[Jim Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an excellent and intriguing collection of long form short fiction. I found each story exceptionally intriguing and I would say that they are more Weird Fiction than straightforward short stories. Which is nice, because I put off reading WILDCATS because I assumed that this was just another short fiction collection. Well, the time was right for me to reach for this book, it seems.
The stories draw you in right from the start, and they gave me that welcome feeling that I should settle in for a good read.
Highly recommended, particularly if you like your fiction a little on the "weird or strange" side of centre.

[em · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars
I loveeeeed the first short story and the last, but the ones in between fell short for me. The writing in all of the stories was beautiful and had an air of something haunting simmering beneath the surface. I almost wish the last story was a novella, there was so much to unpack with Betsy and her story. A mixed bag but some gorgeous prose.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for kindly providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review. #ASongForWildcats #NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

[Kristiana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Galway's A Song for Wildcats is a collection of short stories rich with beautiful storytelling and raw human emotion. Each story is memorable within its own right and it was also refreshing to read stories which felt contemporary but were in fact set decades ago. Galway plays with magical realism, psychological thriller, and family drama. Her characters are well-developed and dynamic, her writing is wonderfully paced and masterfully crafted, and her themes are kaleidoscopic yet all rooted in humanity. I particularly enjoyed how many of Galway's characters across the stories were queer without this defining them entirely, as it's always enjoyable to read stories where queer people exist without them being anomalies. A stunning collection that I'd highly recommend!

[cara · Rating 2 out of 5]

this... simply wasn't my cup of tea. i didn't care about the stories in between, even though the starting one was a banger. i felt so bored throughout reading it because it was pretty poetic writing, yes, but there didn't seem to be much depth to it - or at least not the kind i could readily Feel or connect to.

[Sara Hailstone · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish that I could study Caitlin Galway’s collection of five long-form stories titled, “A Song for Wildcats,” in a literary seminar setting. With many dog-eared pages and underlined passages, Galway’s lyrical writing style inspired me, first and foremost, to want to expand my vocabulary and secondly, the subtle nuances of the true atrocity that plays out in the lives of her richly-formed characters makes me feel that I have not fully taken away the true potential of knowing the lives these characters endured from the crafting of these stories. From detailed historical settings and profundity of characterization, I fully recommend Galway’s collection to the Canlit community.

From postwar Australia, to late 1960s France, the Troubles in Ireland, 1930s New York and to 1980s Nevada, “A Song for Wildcats” presents rising expertise of writing and storytelling to the Canlit community in transporting the reader across the globe and drastically close to fictional characters who feel real. Galway’s settings are leavened with authentic details, I especially connected with the seamless penetration of the natural world that vines up and through the character’s worlds that opened fictive portals for me of entrance into how the characters orient through these divergent sceneries.

Light refracts and enters into these worlds illuminating the psychological and emotional fabric of characters quietly suffering, enduring, and foremost, characters seeking connection. “Whatever my ghost was, she saw, and in each other's company, we could be bodiless and free. Water trickled from a fountain, somewhere behind the tall spires of cypress pines, into a small green pond. Annabelle hummed a funny tune, pausing now and then to correct the melody. She continued stirring, and I leaned my head on her shoulder. We held each other's hands, squeezing like we meant to braid our palm lines, sew them together like thread.” I am left stained from the knowing of two female adolescents in “The Lyrebird’s Bell,” pivoting around each other and their young tragedies, reduced to the elements of their disturbing lives in the wilderness of Australia, wishing that the story would continue on and I could know more of what would become of them.

A collection of literary weight, the reader is pulled through heavy human relationships and character orientations to the people around them. I further was inspired by and found myself magnetized by characters ungrounded, those phantom-like souls existing between waking and dreaming, between the physical and ethereal. Threaded through in some projections of folklore and the creeping in of the spiritual, I wanted more, more backstory, more action beyond the resolution, and yet, I respect the cliffs of these stories that do not reveal all, but forces the reader to connect-the-dots off the words on the page.

Caitlin Galway’s debut 2019 novel, “Bonavere Howl,” with Guernica Editions Inc. was a spring pick by the Globe and Mail. She has also appeared in Best Canadian Stories 2025, EVENI, Gloria Vanderbilt’s Cart V. Cooper Short Fiction Anthology, House of Anansi's The Broken Social Scene Story Project, The Ex- Puritan as the 2020 Thomas Morton Prize winner, and Riddle Fence as the 2011 Short Fiction Contest winner. She has also appeared on CBC Books as the Stranger than Fiction Prize winner. Galway has been referred to as a quickly rising Canadian writer. The five long-form stories in “A Song for Wildcats,” is a Rare Machines Book, an imprint of Dundurn Press, published on June 3, 2025, the collection is fiction, short stories, LGTBQ* and Canadian. “A Song for Wildcats” is already an Indigo Best Book of the year.

Of the five stories, two became enthralling for me, “The Islanders” and “The Lyrebird’s Bell.” Set in the late 1960s in Ireland threading in the riots on Belfast, “The Islanders” planted me in a pained world of a boy who had lost his mother and aunt, a woman who had lost a sister. A severe push-and-pull between boy and aunt, as much as she tries to love him, he pulls away. The boy, instead, is drawn to the ethereal and supernatural folklore texture of the island, and the blending of ghost story and magic realism is what made this story a place of connection for me. Grief is explored through character orientation and action, folding in disquietly with a command of suspense that kept me turning pages to find out more.

“The Lyrebird’s Bell” is a gothic story vining up through the gripping relationship between two young troubled girls left to their own devices in the Australian outback. The girls find companionship in each other’s childhood curiosities amidst the adult atrocities that their tiny lives are thrown into. Girls that could sew the lines on their hands together transgress what children do, to what young women do to protect something of themselves in the world. I was mesmerized by what would become of these girls but also how Galway tangles in the bedrock of the backdrop of their lives with gothic scenery and domestic decay that would make this story interesting to study and discuss with others, in contrast to other gothic narratives. A story of thorns with profound human experiences, the historical residue of each story felt authentic and accentuated Galway’s writing talents.

A description alone of the houses that these two girls resided in made me feel that I was there with these girls, moving through these rooms, absorbing the texture of their drastic gothic lives. Decay has set in, unease, the touch of a past aristocratic civilization slowly being taken over by the unceasing persistence of the Australian outback.

“Our houses were the bones of Regency decadence, stout villas grown ashy with age. They had originally been built for two sisters exiled by scandal, long dead and buried under the red flowering gum. Annabelle had not lived here long - she and her mother had arrived a couple of years earlier, shortly after the war, in early '46, while I had never been outside Victoria. During the warmer months, I had an instructor who drove in from one of the little towns in the Shire of Macedon Ranges. Most recently, an uncompromising young woman of whom I drew, and burned, many lurid portraits. But I had not seen her in some time. In the colder months, I had grown accustomed to seeing no one. I played alone on mossy stones and tangles of woody vines, and stared into the towering rock formations, which rose like a gravestone cavalcade along the Hanging Rock volcano.”

Isolation of setting, separation of two young girls from the adult world around them, yet, like the nature creeping in and threatening to take over, so is their knowledge of the tragedy the adults around them fluctuate from. In the crux of unreliable narration, these characters and much like the other characters in these stories, isolation and separation is a void they plunder through.

Similar to the settings sculpted out in these stories, Galway’s gentle command of the variant natural plant and animal species throughout the narration captivated me as well, inspiring me to become a better writer. I will never forget this descriptive language, for instance:

“Sunlight glowed through the wildfowers beside us, blazing-blue petals like bioluminescence, the light of creatures guided by their own internal ignition. I thumbed a satiny petal and felt the thrill of its frail solidity. The rocks along the shoreline and the brush over the hills felt momentarily real - breakable and flittering, as though I were sitting in a paper diorama being teased and torn apart by the wind.”

Language is presented in new ways, yet palpable in the extension of the emotional make-up of the characters to the world around them.

I was left haunted by sad characters in beautifully overripe. I saw their grief in new ways that will make this collection a text I will come back to for study.

“It was only me out here once more, and I saw no cause to speak, now or ever. A sound only floats away, as all things do. It seemed obvious to me now that no attempt to tether oneself to anything could last. One is always cut loose again by some stronger force and pulled into a more defeated isolation. A place where memories flash like mirrors and you are the only thing that will not leave you.”

Elemental life teachings are braided into character trajectories and train-of-thought. Deeply eloquent and a mastery of language, I am happy to have come across this collection for reviewing.

Thank you to Caitlin Galway, Rare Machines and River Street Writing for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!

https://www.sarahailstone.com/book-re...

[asv:n · Rating 3 out of 5]

An amazing book with a set of stories that gripped my heart! Starting off with the turbulent melancholy companionship of two guys, this book pushed me into a dark pit of human conscience and its hidden corners. I thoroughly enjoyed every single story in this book, jumping from one world to an entirely different words within pages. I would honestly read all other books by the author, for this book showed me how engaging stories can be, even if they are short. The novella sized ones were especially well written, with no loose threads. Such a great read!!

[Mari · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book Review: A Song for Wildcats by Caitlin Galway

Caitlin Galway’s A Song for Wildcats is an arresting, deeply imaginative collection of five long-form stories that explore the unsettling intersections of intimacy, trauma, and fantasy. Set against evocative backdrops—from postwar Australia to the upheaval of 1968 France, from Ireland during the Troubles to shadowy landscapes haunted by phantoms—the book lingers on the raw edges of human experience.

The stories are, above all, haunting. Galway writes with a closeness that is both mesmerizing and suffocating. As a reader, I often felt the narratives crawling under my skin, pulling me into their darkness in ways that were far from comfortable. There is no shortage of suffering here: violence, loss, neglect, and the specter of abuse recur throughout the book. Reading sometimes felt like a lucid dream—caught between distance and immersion, unable to look away even when I wanted to.
What elevates the collection beyond mere bleakness, however, is its strange, almost mythical atmosphere. Galway conjures scenes that shimmer with otherworldly unease: a blood-stained girl disappearing into a fairy circle, children carrying buckets of crimson water along a beach, rifts in reality where doppelgängers slip through. These fantastical moments pierce through the grimness and captivate with their eerie beauty, reminding the reader of the thin line between the real and the surreal.

One drawback for me was the lack of clear boundaries between stories—at least in my eBook edition. At times, transitions felt abrupt and disorienting, with one narrative bleeding directly into the next. Given the intensity of each piece, clearer separations would have been welcome, offering space to breathe before plunging into the next unsettling tale.

I remain conflicted about how to classify my experience with this book. I cannot say I enjoyed reading it, but its lingering impact is undeniable. A Song for Wildcats is not for the faint of heart. Readers should be prepared for depictions of sexual violence, abuse, suicide, and emotional devastation. Yet for those who seek stories that are brutal, dreamlike, and disturbingly intimate—stories that fuse myth and horror with psychological depth—this collection is well worth the plunge.

In the end, Galway’s writing left me both disturbed and fascinated, a combination that ensures her work will stay with me for a long time.

[franzi jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

First of all, thank you to NetGalley and Rare Machines/Dundurn Press for the eArc of this book!

When I got approved for the eARC of this book I was ecstatic for mainly two reasons:
1. because I’ve been looking for a short story collection to accommodate my chronically online attention span
2. because all 5 stories sounded exactly like something that would get me real good.

I was (almost) entirely right. A Song for Wildcats had me in a grip from the first page on and it didn’t really let me go until the last one. In this book are incredible stories, all worth your time and your attention, and I am so glad I got to read them.

Caitlin Galway has a way with words that manages to strike true every single time – vivid imagery, poignant descriptions of grief, love and loyalty. An effortless blend of the real world and the supernatural draws you right in and puts you right at the heart of the story.

Every story deals with a different kind of trauma, a different kind of grief, whether it’s grieving family, love or even loss of yourself but one thing these stories are not, is devoid of hope. Hope for escape, hope for peace, hope for love; hope is embedded in every line and it’s what makes it all worth it.

Each story stands strong on its own, whether it’s a tale of secret summer love amid the Paris student riots, of an orphan and his aunt trying to work through their shared grief, of a girl trying to find herself, of a young woman trying to make sense of a lost friend or of two girls trying to survive their families out in the Australian wilderness. Only one of them, ‘The Wisp’, didn’t quite catch me, but I’m chalking that up to me just not getting it.

This collection is definitely worth reading and worth feeling, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

[Nikki · Rating 3 out of 5]

Caitlyn Galway certainly has skill as a writer. Her prose is phenomenal, and any fan of detailed, poetic writing styles will enjoy the experience of reading her stories.

If you are a fan of realistically written queer characters, complex familial dynamics, and people who feel like real people just doing their best amidst the chaos of life, this is worth a read. The discussion on interpersonal relationships in many forms throughout the work was very well done.

Despite her talent, this is only a three star for me. While the first story and the final two stories were excellent, the middle dragged, and I found myself fighting the urge to skim. I will also say I am a fan of collections with slightly shorter stories than the average page length of those in this collection, so that may have played a factor.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with an E-ARC. All opinions are my own.

[MichiruEll · Rating 3 out of 5]

This story collection brings us on a journey through the 20th century and through the world to meet different characters, many of whom are queer, and their relationships and tragedies. Many of these stories are sad and center characters that have experienced or are experiencing horrible circumstances. There are some elements of speculative fiction, sometimes explicit, sometimes just felt in the prose.

The language is poetic and detailed, sometimes to the point of being a bit hard to follow. The characters are realistic and complex, and the antagonist character in one of the stories was so well crafted that I wanted to enter the book and strangle him myself.

I enjoyed the first and last story, but unfortunately, even if they were beautifully written, I failed to connect with the others.

Thank you to Netgalley and Dundurn Press for providing me with an ARC of this book.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of five short stories from Caitlin Galway was an impressive read on my flight home from East Asia. I feel like I really struggle to review and rate collections like these, so stay with me here! Galway’s lyrical and ethereally evocative writing shines through on every page of this book. You’re enveloped in lush prose or dunked into messy grief and trauma, and it sticks with you. For that reason, I found it difficult to move from story to story. Unfortunately, this also meant that I found it hard to parse between stories. For me, Wisp and The Lyrebird’s Bell worked better for me than the others and perhaps that’s because I’d finally gotten to grips with Galway’s style? I’d also recommend giving the content warnings a quick search before reading.

[K.R. Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

An encounter in a Corsican harbour town forces a young Englishman to face the trauma that took him there. A wrong turn in the Nevada desert unmoors a recent high-schooler’s reality. Eerie sisters haunt an Irish beach, opening a space for lost family and dark possibilities.

From the lushly Durrell-like to the gently surreal to the downright creepy, the five stories in Caitlin Galway’s luminously original new collection A Song for Wildcats run their fingers along the feathery border between the here and the half-imagined.

[Whatithinkaboutthisbook · Rating 4 out of 5]

A vibrant and haunting short story collection with each story wonderfully substantial - more like a novella in depth and emotional weight. The vivid writing immediately immerses the reader, plunging you into narratives deeply rooted in grief, rage, sorrow, sexuality and violence. Galway’s prose is both lyrical and unflinching, delivering raw emotional impact while maintaining a poetic elegance.

Each story leaves a lingering impression, emotionally stirring and richly layered. Galway masterfully captures longing and trauma with dynamic, evocative language that pulses with life. The stories dazzle with its blend of psychological tension, family drama and surreal flourishes of magical realism.

Powerful, provocative and unforgettable

[Portia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting collection but peaked with the first story for me, which I thought was beautiful and haven't stopped thinking about. All the others felt somewhat half-formed; I would have loved to read more fleshed-out novella-length versions. That said, I loved the writing style and will definitely be reading more of Caitlin Galway's work.

A Song for Wildcats ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Heatstroke ⭐⭐⭐✨
The Islanders ⭐⭐⭐✨
The Wisp ⭐⭐⭐
The Lyrebird's Bell ⭐⭐⭐

(Netgalley ARC)

[Meg · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of five stories set in different times and places but all with similar vibes. They each contain elements of longing and haunting and are written with a lovely lyrical prose, full of imagery. I wanted to like this more than I did. I struggled to become fully immersed and found myself frequently distracted. I easily forgot who and what I was reading about. I suspect this might have been a me problem rather than a book problem.

[i]

Thank you to Caitlin Galway, Dundurn Press, Rare Machines, and NetGalley for the e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

I loved the first story and the last story so much but the ones they sandwiched fell flat for me a little. I would have liked to have seen those two stories fleshed out a little more. Maybe there’s an audience for them, just wasn’t for me.

[Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Song for Wildcats by Caitlin Galway

"Poison went down cleanly enough but made a frothing mess when it came back up."

or...

She could never explain it to anyone, or make much sense of it herself. That is what they never tell you of madness, how you remain unchanged. How it is the world around you that slips and shivers out of place."

[Alison · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an extraordinary, utterly unique collection. It's strikingly beautiful in its prose, and profoundly moving in its explorations of self, connection, healing, and grief. Its philosophical reflections are also very fascinating, insightful, and surprisingly haunting.

[Vela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written, moving stories. I often worry with short stories the characters fall flat but not here. These were wonderfully haunting... I enjoyed this very much.

4.5/5

[Anne Baldo · Rating 5 out of 5]

In beautiful and shadowy prose, these five novellas explore how our memories and the past both sustain and haunt us.

[Alison Gadsby · Rating 5 out of 5]

With gorgeous illustrative prose and an obvious emotional devotion to her characters, Caitlin Galway gives us five short stories that each leave a lingering attachment to the people and places we visit in A SONG FOR WILDCATS. Despite the uniquely drawn characters living in different time periods, each story feels like a vital part of the whole. It is in a “vast sea” of love, grief, pain and loss where we find these people struggling to stay afloat, where the ecstasy of feeling, experiencing, of living pulls them into the depths.
In France during the Viet Nam war, Alfie falls in love with Felix but cannot free himself from the memory of harm and liberate love from pain.
On July 5, 1982, Fiona wakes in a motel room with no memory of how she got there, except a certain knowledge that she lives in a reality “that never should have been”. In Northern Ireland during the troubles, a woman discovers her eleven-years-dead sister’s child in an orphanage and puts her life on hold to manage him and the phantoms of war appearing at the beach.
A woman—known by people in her hometown in New York to be a mad child—returns home to find the truth about her best friend Sabrina’s suspicious death.
And in the final story, we’re in Australia after World War II, with Annabelle and Elizabeth enveloping each other in the madness of their obsessive relationship.

The stories in A SONG FOR WILDCATS are as discomfiting as a crow pecking at the window but as visually soothing as a soaring flock of birds. They are the “rage and loss that tie a spirit to the earth.” The stories exist in the murky surrealism of lives fractured by violence and grief, and they are the shame and pain we burrow deep inside ourselves when the burden of damaged childhoods becomes too heavy to carry.
Galway has given us a remarkable and exemplary collection of fiction filled with so many stunning sentences, I filled three notebook pages with quotes.