Shortlisted for the 2013 Stella Prize
Like a House on Fire – Cate Kennedy
Fiction · Scribe
About the book
In Like a House on Fire, Cate Kennedy 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 an elderly patient defy doctor’s orders. In ‘Cross-Country’, a jilted lover manages to misinterpret her ex’s new life. And in ‘Ashes’, a son accompanies his mother on a journey to scatter his father’s remains, while lifelong resentments simmer in the background.
“Kennedy is a realist writer who writes of ordinary people’s lives and feelings in the here and now”
– 2013 Stella Prize Judges
About the author
Cate Kennedy
Cate Kennedy is the author of the highly acclaimed novel The World Beneath, which won the People’s Choice Award in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 2010. She is an award-winning short-story writer whose work has been published widely. Her first collection, Dark Roots, was shortlisted for the Steele Rudd Award in the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. She is also the author of a travel memoir, Sing, and Don’t Cry, and the poetry collections Joyflight, Signs of Other Fires and The Taste of River Water, which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2011. She lives on a secluded bend of the Broken River in north-east Victoria.
Judges’ report
Like a House on Fire is a substantial book that maintains its quality from start to finish, with no slight or weak stories added to make weight. Kennedy is well known as one of the country’s best practitioners of the form and these fifteen strong and vivid stories do not disappoint, each of them showing her instinctive feel for the shape and pace of a short story. Kennedy is a realist writer who writes of ordinary people’s lives and feelings in the here and now, and her characters and their dilemmas are immediately recognisable and sometimes even uncomfortably close to home.
While alert to the darker side of life, Kennedy also focuses on the small moments of revelatory tenderness that can redeem even a toxic situation, as with the mother-and-child moments in ‘Ashes’ and ‘Five-Dollar Family’. She explores unorthodox relationships that stretch the boundaries of daily life, like the hospital cleaner with the elderly patient in ‘Laminex and Mirrors’, or the strange moments of family truce, as with the complicit sisters wrecking the family photo in ‘Whirlpool’. The stories in this collection have a strong family relationship that makes the book seem more that just the sum of its parts; it’s as though the various characters from the different stories could pass each other in the street every day.
Explore the latest from Stella
From the 2026 Stella Prize Chair of Judges, Sophie Gee What an honor to be standing in this room of distinguished Australian …
This month Stella celebrates Rapture, longlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize. We sat down with Emily to discuss character building in historical …
My business is more with pictures, rather than words, and so I’m nervous to give this speech, especially in a room with …
Help change the story
As a not-for-profit organisation with ambitious goals, Stella relies on the generous support of donors to help fund our work.
Every donation is important to us and allows Stella to continue its role as the leading voice for gender equality and cultural change in Australian literature.
Stella is a not-for-profit organisation with DGR status. All donations of $2 or more are tax-deductible.
