Description
By (author) Kennedy Louise
WINNER OF THE AN POST IRISH BOOK AWARDS NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2022SHORTLISTED FOR THE WATERSTONES DEBUT FICTION PRIZE 2022
AN OBSERVER BEST DEBUT NOVELIST OF 2022 A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK AT BEDTIME
A 2022 BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR: THE TIMES * SUNDAY TIMES * GUARDIAN * TELEGRAPH * NEW STATESMAN *IRISH TIMES * IRISH INDEPENDENT
”Like
Sally Rooney mixed with a political thriller’ RUSSELL KANE
”Intense, unflinchingly honest, it broke my heart a million times” MARIAN KEYES
”Absolutely loved it” MAX PORTER
”A beautiful, devastating novel” NICK HORNBYOne by one, she undid each event, each decision, each choice. If Davy had remembered to put on a coat.If Seamie McGeown had not found himself alone on a dark street.If Michael Agnew had not walked through the door of the pub on a quiet night in February in his white shirt. There is nothing special about the day Cushla meets Michael, a married man from Belfast, in the pub owned by her family. But here, love is never far from violence, and this encounter will change both of their lives forever.As people get up each morning and go to work, school, church or the pub, the daily news rolls in of another car bomb exploded, another man beaten, killed or left for dead. In the class Cushla teaches, the vocabulary of seven-year-old children now includes phrases like ‘petrol bomb’ and ‘rubber bullets’. And as she is forced to tread lines she never thought she would cross, tensions in the town are escalating, threatening to destroy all she is working to hold together.
Tender and shocking, Trespasses is an unforgettable debut of people trying to live ordinary lives in extraordinary times.
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Not many novels mix juicy romance and wartime violence. War-induced longing is a common fictional occurrence – consider Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong, or, to a lesser degree, Ian McEwan’s Atonement – but a vivid, sexy, not-doomed-feeling love story that also takes a war zone as a central subject rather than simply a setting is rarer
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A first novel that reads nothing like one, this is a tender, fiercely beautiful story . . . Every finely grooved detail here feels authentic’
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Hands down the best book this year was Trespasses by Louise Kennedy. There has been praise for Kennedy’s eye in recreating the Belfast of the mid-70s, but it is the precision of the emotional detail that holds the readers attention: after a while, you forget to exhale
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We know that civil wars are made up of thousands of small tragedies. But I know few novels that convey the grim predictability of everyday violence during that period so well. Kennedy’s careful attention is a welcome counter to Brexit’s careless disregard of lives and loves lost
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Brilliant, beautiful, heartbreaking . . . I am not a crier, but by the final pages of Trespasses I was in tears. It’s a testament to Kennedy’s talents that we come to love and care so much about her characters
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Thrilling, wise, and moving, Trespasses is a remarkable novel about the wages of love in a time marked by brutality, strife, and above all, a will to hope. A totally absorbing read
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Absorbing . . . Wise far beyond its first book status, Trespasses vaults Kennedy into the ranks of such contemporary masters as McCann, Claire Keegan, Colin Barrett, and fellow Sligo resident, Kevin Barry
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Brilliantly depicted . . . Kennedy has written a captivating first novel which manages to be beautiful and devastating in equal measure
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Kennedy’s powerful writing, tragic humour and vivid c
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