Lent from award-winning writer Kate Cayley is built from this tension, exploring domestic and artistic life amidst the environmental crisis and the surprising ways that every philosophical quandary—large and small—converges in the home, in small objects, conversations, and moments. The grotesque and the tedious, the baroque and the banal, intertwine in the first three sections. Meticulous depictions of spectacle run into the repetition of daily domestic life: trying to explain time to children, day trips to the planetarium, and the warnings of strangers; these are interspersed with depictions such as Mary Shelley recalling the monster, the inner life of a seventeenth century portrait sitter, and Ted Hughes's second wife telling her story to the dead Sylvia Plath. The title section explores religious faith; how belief is itself a repetition, a slow accumulation over time, just like love or forgiveness.

Lent is an exquisite work of our era, asking us to contemplate what it means to live in a broken world—and why we still find it beautiful. (From Book*Hug Press)

Kate Cayley is a fiction writer, playwright and poet based in Toronto. She is also the author of the YA novel The Hangman in the Mirror, the poetry collections When This World Comes to an End and Other Houses and the short story collections How You Were Born and Householders. Cayley made the longlist for the 2016 CBC Short Story Prize and previously she'd made the 2013 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for Writers' Bedrooms.