Property

by Kate Cayley

A modern, class-conscious Mrs. Dalloway, this unsettling novel dissects common narratives of family and community, showing the fragile ties that hold us together.

A spring day in an average gentrifying neighbourhood begins unremarkably enough; by evening someone has died.

The local residents go about their daily routines: Nat, a middle-aged queer mother of two, feigns normalcy as she worries about her daughter and her taciturn, loner son locked in his room upstairs. Her friend Maddy, a failed actress and fellow parent, and her husband plan to go to Nat's for dinner. Next door, Ilya, still recovering from a gruesome industrial accident, is struggling to renovate a fixer-upper, but a buried stream keeps threatening to flood the basement. The troubled residents stumble through their errands and to-do lists, but each seemingly inconsequential exchange tightens in around the neighbourhood, until finally tragedy strikes, leaving it forever changed.

With crystalline prose that balances emotional complexity and a hint of satire, Property explores the thorniness of class and privilege in a city stretched to the breaking point. The novel shows the complicated politics of queer respectability, friendship, the real and imaginary perils of raising children, and the ways that we hurt one another without meaning to.

Genres: Fiction, Canada, Queer

232 pages, Paperback

First published October 7, 2025

About the author

Kate Cayley is the artistic director and co-founder of For Stranger Theatre. The Hangman in the Mirror is her first novel for young adults. Her writing, including poetry and short fiction, has appeared in a variety of literary magazines. She is currently the writer in residence at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, Ontario.

Reviews

[Amarah H-S]

(as i write this review i am very tired and not sure whether the sentences will all make sense. official disclaimer.)

Beautiful ensemble cast of characters, and such a lovely cadence to the writing. The story stays engaging and emotionally resonant even as it unfolds slowly over the course of a day—partially because we experience this day through so many different sets of eyes. When you dedicate this much text to a single day, no detail is truly mundane; everything takes on a sort of significance. I enjoyed trying to parse it.

I found myself struck by the cosmic injustice of the fact that, when the novel ends, some of these characters are happy, and some are not. A very simple fact, and yet it was devastating. When a book can make you feel an ordinary fact of human life in a really deep and immediate way, I think that’s a good book.

[Lisa Alward · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an extraordinary novel, one of the most intense, beautifully written, and emotional (I sobbed through the last chapter) that I've read in a long time. A contemporary, post-pandemic Mrs. Dalloway, it weaves together the various streams of consciousness of two families and their neighbours in a gentifying area of Toronto's west end. The cast is large, but I felt incredibly invested in each character, a tribute to Cayley's empathy and her ability as a writer to go deep, exposing our secret fault lines and longings. There is an underlying darkness here (this is a novel set during the Trump years after all), yet also light in the darkness. Highly, highly recommend!

[lily · Rating 4 out of 5]

i love it when you can see so deeply into characters lives and you can make a story out of simply a day, there were some great lines in this book

“And his father would be alone again, which he dreaded. Not knowing, like Ilya, that we are alone anyway.”

“… the preacher would press his hands to Ilya’s forehead, showing Ilya that it was possible to be touched.”

“What if he wore his life lightly, something he wasn’t sure he wanted to keep?”

“That was childhood’s ability to shrug off the past, make it truly past. It was only later that it caught you.”

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Am I wrong to see this novel as a devastating critique of late-stage capitalism, of a culture in which everyone, children and adults alike, assigns the basest motives to each other and moves through the world solipsistically? There's something upsettingly harsh about the worldview that Kate Cayley puts forth in "Property." It's Beckett with less humor. Virginia Woolf with fewer uplifting epiphanies. But it's also got something uniquely its own. For the characters populating this mean suburban landscape are painfully familiar. The lesbian couple who have fallen into a tensely heteronormative marriage; the two teen girls who make a game out of cruelty; the middle-aged actress who's more concerned with her next role than her marriage; the immigrant laborer who the surrounding homeowners only half-see. That Cayley has chosen to apply a day-in-the-life approach to her portrait of a nasty neighborhood only makes its tragic ending that much more epic. Like "Oedipus" or "Medea," a feeling of doom underlies these proceedings. You know, terrible events lie ahead yet you can't look away from the impending wreck.

[Mike Broderick · Rating 3 out of 5]

I told myself that my next book, whatever that was, would not be a 7 (3.5 star that I either need to bump up or down. And here we are with another book that I was okay with so now it is decision time. 4 star or 3 star.......At the end of the day, I finished this over a week ago and it is not memorable. So, it is in the meh, category. What was good about it? Cayley created characters that are real, relatable and mostly likeable. She created scenarios that could the reader could see in their own community. The entire book revolves around a group of neighbors and the world they live in together. What was not good.....boring moments, in a short book, so many moments of me tuning out is not ideal.

[Anna P · Rating 5 out of 5]

as a Torontonian I especially appreciated this book - and I loved picking up hints and details about otherwise unnamed neighbourhood (around West Queen West) and references to recent events. the author has a great talent for creating realistic and relatable characters from very different backgrounds and demographics and giving them distinctive voices. it was a page turner for me even though there is not that much dialogue and sometimes not much happens, it is just a character sharing their thoughts, memories and opinions. insightful and moving - a great read for me.

[Rob J · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is set over a single day, in a single neighborhood, yet manages to be about many things. That is partly why it is so interesting. It explores the layers of time, meaning, experience, status, and relationship that can make a single human interaction almost endlessly complex.

But of all the things this book is about, the main thing, as I read it, is the role of men and masculinity in a feminized society. A masterful treatment of that timely question.

[Enid Wray]

Sadly I struggled to get into this one and now my digital arc is about to expire and I don’t have time to finish it.

Maybe I’ll circle back to it one day…?

Thanks to the publisher and Edelweiss for granting me access to an early digital review copy.

DNF (for now)

[Lauren Simmons · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a small book, in a way, set in one small Toronto neighbourhood and focused on the events of one day, and I liked that. I also liked the shifting narrative perspectives, though some worked better for me than others. A bit heavy handed in the overall message but not without merit.

[Cindy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whew. A good one. I greatly appreciated the audiobook for this.

[Lindsay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Coming Soon.