Daybooks

Two women, Nat and Frankie, await the arrival of their dinner guests. It is an early spring evening, not yet dark. The “drills and hammers and music” that filled the streets of their “up-and-coming” Toronto neighbourhood all afternoon have been replaced by the distant sound of a brass band. They each take a shot of tequila. They kiss. “Nat tilted her head back, letting the day and her upset wash over her,” indulging in a moment of pleasure before their ten-year-old daughter, Clio, bursts into the kitchen. And they remember that their son, Felix, still hasn’t returned home.

“Where was Felix?” This refrain rings throughout the final third of Kate Cayley’s Property. A third-person narrator wanders in and out of Nat’s mind as she fights the urge to abandon their evening plans and go look for her twelve-year-old child. Between her thoughts, memories, and worries, there are extended descriptions of the couple’s recently renovated home: “They had arrived in their settled lives: the grey-and-blue rug that echoed the blue walls, the soporific beeswax candles with their squat flames, the low sun through the window above the sink, in the backyard flashing spears of green coming up from the bulbs they’d planted in the fall, the raised beds surrounded by a fur of early grass.”

The domestic space is slick with symbolism, mirroring the tension that rises and falls between the women in the span of a few minutes. Shortly after their intimate brush against the counter, they come to a superficial impasse about dessert. “Nat didn’t know how that happened,” Cayley writes, of the sudden silence. “How two people could carry twenty years between them and yet not help falling into standoffs over things neither would remember.” As quickly as it opens, the chasm between them disappears from view as their neighbours — Maddy, Alex, and their children, Sylvie and Milo — ring the doorbell.

Property is set over the course of one day. It is rich with revealing passages, in which minutes are laden with flashes of worry, desire, and shame. Divided into three parts —“Morning,” “Afternoon,” and “Evening”— it is an elegant manipulation of time. In rending open fleeting moments and inserting them under her microscope, Cayley creates an environment in which everything has heightened meaning and in which no action or transgression, however small, is without potential consequence.

Much like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which the novel is clearly indebted to, Property follows a woman preparing to welcome guests — in this case, for a “stupid dinner.” We first meet Nat before nine in the morning, when “the sun was pale gold, the real heat beginning,” watching Clio and Sylvie, her best friend, cross the lawn and head toward school. As Felix eats breakfast, Nat’s to‑do list for the day unfurls in her head, veering from mundane tasks like “check ingredients” into a stream of anxiety: “Host a dinner party even if it is an affectation to think of it as a dinner party and Frankie is right she doesn’t really like them or that’s not right either Alex is just bland and she is sorry for Maddy these days but Maddy doesn’t like Clio after all that stuff at school . . .”

While rarely losing sight of Nat’s perspective, the narrator also moves between the minds of those who surround her. We peer into the days of her children and various locals, including the old woman down the block who “saw everything” from between her curtains, “the walking man” who aimlessly paces around, and Ilya, a handyman working on an empty home. Their gentrifying street itself is a character. “All the houses in this part of the city are crooked,” Cayley writes. “Foundations cracked, water running beneath.” The various construction projects under way are at odds with the clay ground, which acts as an obstacle to progress. Similarly, hordes of “scurrying and splashing” rats underline how temporary — and futile — human homes are. On the very first page, we learn that “later in this day, when someone dies, it will not trouble” them; the rodents will carry on, tunnelling, burrowing, and chewing their way through basements.

As death looms, the characters navigate a seemingly normal day. The anticipation of tragedy is emphasized by Nat’s long-standing concerns for Felix, whose solitary nature unnerves her. Toward the end of the morning, while mixing bread dough, she finds herself “agonizing” over his unhappiness. Again and again, her thoughts circle around the idea that he is sociopathic. “What if she’d ignored all the signs?” While picking up her children from school, she imagines her family as characters in a horror story. She decides that she would be eaten. Clio would be the last one standing, the “Final Girl” to defeat the axe-wielding killer. Frankie “would make the best of it.” And Felix would be “a shut‑in,” unless, of course, he was the murderer. Even though she tries to shift her focus —“Stop it,” she tells herself repeatedly — she compulsively wonders about his future.

Interludes centred on Felix challenge his mother’s idea of him, revealing the inner world of a misanthropic preteen whose sensitivity to injustice makes him quick to flare. After an altercation on the street sets him off, he runs away from Nat. She is forced to go home and wait. “She wanted to trust him,” Cayley writes. “She didn’t trust him.” Unbeknownst to his parents, he ends up sidetracked, scouring the area for the old woman’s missing dog.

With Felix’s disappearance, Cayley adds a new layer of dread. By the time they sit down for dinner, the language is thick with foreboding. The future — full of regret and what‑ifs — begins to bleed into the story. In retrospect, when Nat thinks of how many times she wanted to leave the table to look for Felix but didn’t, “she is angry with Frankie and with herself.” And though “Clio privately believes for the rest of her life” that she heard her brother and the old woman yelling out for the dog, she justifies her own inaction: “She couldn’t have heard clearly enough to know who was shouting, or why.” As the tragedy slowly unfolds, Cayley’s simple prose belies the intricate temporal framework.

The slippery nature of time has been a structuring force across Cayley’s work. In “Trying to Explain Time to Children,” from her 2023 collection, Lent, she writes, “You will not recognize it. It will feel ordinary. / You will be as you have been: / at a loss and decisive, complete and broken.” Elsewhere she lingers on temporality, especially within domestic spaces: “I must praise household objects. / For they conquer time patiently.” Read alongside her fiction, these poems — one of which is called “Of Rats and Floods”— reinforce how fruitful a single image or idea can be. Cayley’s mastery of these interlocking themes is on full display in Property.

Kate Cayley turns to the circadian novel to explore the way people intersect and alter the course of one another’s lives. In Souvankham Thammavongsa’s hands, the form becomes a profound if claustrophobic study of one woman’s interiority. Ning is a retired boxer living in a tiny apartment on top of her nail salon. Her athletic discipline has found another outlet in the obsessive routine of work. “I can’t remember the last time I spent any time away from it,” she thinks, after waking up. “I live down there, really.”

The slim book borrows its title from the first thing Ning says to clients: “Pick a colour.” The seemingly innocuous phrase speaks to what she has built her solitary adult life around: the imperative to minimize all personal interactions. “I am alone because I want to be,” she maintains. “I am a family of one.” When we meet Ning, she has insulated herself from the outside world entirely, except for the dribble of culture that comes in through the shop’s door.

“Everyone is ugly,” Ning says in the opening line. “I should know. I look at people all day.” This coarseness sets the tone for what’s to come. While navigating a single day in her small shop, she offers a stoic indictment of the North American wellness industry, particularly of its vanity and xenophobia. Her thoughts coalesce into a critique of the way all of us — some more than others — are forced to shed our identities to participate in society. Ning is hyperaware of this aspect of the immigrant experience. “The brightly lit box we work in is called ‘Susan’s,’ ” she says, explaining that she dubs all the women on her staff Susan, in addition to asking them all to dress the same and wear their hair the same length.

The shop is an ecosystem constructed from Ning’s idea of the docile personas that people expect to find there. Unlike some of her employees, she seems content to be an unknowable blank slate as she approaches forty-two. “It’s a good age to be,” she thinks. “I don’t have to become anything anymore.” Clinging to routine, she is stringent about her methods for handling the egos of customers. Her control is atmospheric; it extends to everything, from the appointment log to the phrases they use, the way they pump lotion, and the time they spend on certain treatments: “I watch everything closely. The girls don’t like it.” Although she is didactic and harsh, Ning has a real softness for the women who work for her. She lets them gossip in front of customers in their shared language, occasionally joining in, and accepts that they probably criticize her too. “As long as it stays behind my back,” she thinks. “It’s how they bond with each other. Talking about me.”

Ning’s voice is as unforgettable as it is detached. As the afternoon progresses, she dips into traumatic memories of her intense relationships with her former boxing coach and her old boss. Recounted with indifference, these moments begin to explain the wedge Ning has put between herself and others. “And that thing I have been told — protect yourself at all times — I still do it,” she says. “Just can’t let anybody in.” By the time she receives an unwelcome visitor at the end of her shift, it is clear that insecurity, much more than business savvy, has written the rules she lives by.

With Pick a Colour, her highly anticipated first novel, Souvankham Thammavongsa provides her readers with a singular guide to harrowing truths about class, loneliness, and the art of self-preservation.