'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 J. Kady grew up in South Africa where she studied architecture before immigrating to Canada and starting to write. She now lives in Toronto. Her fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in Canada and the United States, including The Journey Prize Anthology, Coming Attractions and Best Canadian Stories, and has been short-listed for the Journey Prize, a National Magazine Award, and a Western Magazine Award.

Vivette J. Kady is a seeing-eye human to a blind dog. She has climbed to the top of the highest dune in the Namib desert, and she used to be a go-go dancer, in South Africa.

Vivette Kady's profile page

Vivette J. Kady grew up in South Africa where she studied architecture before immigrating to Canada and starting to write. She now lives in Toronto. Her fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in Canada and the United States, including The Journey Prize Anthology, Coming Attractions and Best Canadian Stories, and has been short-listed for the Journey Prize, a National Magazine Award, and a Western Magazine Award.

Vivette J. Kady is a seeing-eye human

Porcupine's Quill's profile page

• Short-listed, Danuta Gleed Award

'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.'

Books in Canada

'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.'

Canadian Book Review Annual

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

Calgary Herald

'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.'

Hour

'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.'

Toronto Star

'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.'

Quill and Quire