The Porcupine's Quill

‘Early that summer, my grandma dropped dead watching The Price is Right, and the following week Aunt Lois, my mother’s sister, moved in and declared we would no longer be running a breeding factory....’ Vivette Kady’s Most Wanted is an exercise in transcendence and the bizarre; her stories are ferociously written and will be ferociously felt.

The thirteen stories in Vivette J. Kady’s Most Wanted drop us into domestic landscapes we think we know -- until we are greeted by a cross-dressing pigeon-fancier, a phone-sex worker and a three-legged dog named Duane. Most Wanted begins with loss, ends with solace, and strange things happen in between: steak knives become darts, a mouse suffers an agonizing death, an inner incubus is embraced, and lightning strikes with amazing results.

Kady writes with the discipline of a master-builder, but her brilliance comes from the manner in which her characters transcend fractured relationships, confinement and longing, and move out into the world whole and dignified. In strong, brave prose, Kady is a compassionate observer of the bittersweet in life.

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‘The 13 stories in Most Wanted, a debut collection by Toronto-based Vivette J. Kady, are a reminder of how hardy a plant literary fiction is. Small-press story collections are a marginal presence to begin with, even in the world of literary fiction. Such literary awards as the Giller Prize like to make token inclusion of such collections among finalists, although they never win. Book clubs pass them by, usually. Yet we would miss them if they disappeared. Sometimes they hold the mirror up to our society with greater clarity than good novels.’

—Philip Marchand, Toronto Star

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‘Kady is at her best when taking familiar scenes of romantic and familial dysfunction and infusing them with vivid detail and an impeccable sense of timing.’

—Stewart Cole, Quill and Quire

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‘Vivette J Kady grew up in South Africa, but there is nothing of that far land in these thirteen tales. Instead, the unknown continent Kady explores is the human psyche. These stories present a startling array of characters who blaze their way across page after page, redefining dysfunction as they go. What seems to bind together Kady’s odd assortment of children, adults, even the occasional dog, is the unsteadiness of their grip.’

—Nancy Wigston, Books in Canada

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‘Vivette J Kady’s debut, Most Wanted, is a collection of 13 short stories that are sharp, quick and unexpected -- call it suckerpunch fiction.’

—Ali Riley, Calgary Herald

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‘Vivette Kady writes impeccably about romance and family dysfunction. The 13 stories in Most Wanted explore the bizarre world of a cross-dressing widower who plays dad to a gaggle of pigeons, a phone-sex worker and a three-legged dog named Duane. Kady’s prose is silken, her authorial voice prominent, and she seduces the reader with her compassion and humour. As Kady’s characters overcome broken relationships, loneliness and unfulfilled desires, they learn to rediscover the world with dignity and hope.’

—M J Stone, Hour

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‘Whether it’s Lorna with her incubus, Maddox who’s received a mind-changing jolt from his electric guitar, or Roy the cross-dresser, we are among people for whom the title of the book might be ‘‘Most Unwanted.’’ But they survive, show moments of compassion, and sometimes rise above their situations, and so we survive with them, mainly because Kady is such a brilliant writer. Her characters live, if not the way we would like them to, at least as fictional realities. And even when we fail to sympathize, Kady’s prose style entrances and beguiles, so that the pleasure is real, if nothing else seems so.’

—R Gordon Moyles, Canadian Book Review Annual

Back cover copy

‘Vivette J. Kady grew up overseas, in South Africa. It is partly this that gives her such a keen perspective on human location and dislocation. Her characters, who range from teenage mothers to elderly dowsers, live dangerous and troubled lives, marked by miscommunication and pain, but also by intangible moments of joy. Indeed, it is perhaps these strange joys that are most vivid in her stories. ‘‘Lightning isn’t just one single stroke that falls to the earth,’’ says one of her characters. ‘‘It moves so quickly, we can’t see it’s actually rising, not falling.’’ It is this rise in the midst of apparent fall that courses through Kady’s work.’

—Maggie Helwig, Coming Attractions: 2000