Cate Kennedy

Once, Rich and Sandy were environmental activists, part of a world-famous blockade in Tasmania to save the wilderness. Now, 25 years later, they have settled into the uncomfortable compromises of middle age – although they've gone about it in very different ways. About the only thing they have in common these days is their 15-year-old daughter, Sophie. When Rich decides...

From prize-winning short-story writer Cate Kennedy comes a new collection to rival her highly acclaimed Dark Roots. In Like a House on Fire, Kennedy once again takes ordinary lives and dissects their ironies, injustices and pleasures with her humane eye and wry sense of humour. In Laminex and Mirrors, a young woman working as a cleaner in a hospital helps...

In these sublimely sophisticated tales, Cate Kennedy opens up worlds of finely observed detail. Her stories are populated by people at tipping points in their lives—moments that find them poised between a familiar past and an unfamiliar future. In The Testosterone Club, a neglected wife plans an unsavoury revenge on her boorish husband. In Resize, a married couple realise their...

Disarming, warm, and always accessible, Cate Kennedy's poems make ordinary experiences glow. Everything that suffuses her well-loved prose is here: compassion, insight, lyrical precision, and the clear, minimalist eye that reveals how life can turn on a single moment. Musing on the undercurrents and interconnections between legacy, memory, motherhood, and the natural world, the poems in this exhilarating collection begin...

Sing, and Don't Cry is Cate Kennedy's sensual and touching evocation of her time spent working as a volunteer in small town Mexico. The people she comes to love in Tequisquiapan, and their gusto for celebration, pilgrimage and family, force her to cast a penetrating light on her own Western values and ways. 'What is truly essential, and who is...