Trespasses is framed by an encounter that takes place decades later. “It’s not about what you do here,” he reminds Cushla, “it’s about what you are.” Sure enough, circumstances will leave her acts of well-intentioned kindness to Davy’s family looking as twisted as barbed wire. He also voices the sheer claustrophobia of living in a world where you’re defined first and foremost by religious affiliation. Michael, meanwhile, becomes a handy mouthpiece for setting the Troubles in historical context. “The state of it,” she says, as they drive past the much-bombed Europa hotel. Cushla herself, though self-conscious in the company of Michael’s accomplished friends, speaks with a perfect blend of tough humour and vulnerable sincerity. She makes potent symbolic use of visual details, capturing, for instance, the mothers waiting outside school, their “umbrellas touching like a badly made quilt”, and her idiomatic dialogue gives her prose real verve.Ĭushla’s mother, the gin-soaked Gina, has a particularly fine line in insults: Helen Mirren, seen on a TV chatshow, is a “dirty article”. Kennedy, a fiftysomething former chef, spent much of her childhood in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Over the course of spring and summer, these two distinct plotlines converge to devastating effect. The first tracks Cushla’s affair with Michael Agnew, an older, married Protestant the second her involvement in the home life of bullied pupil Davy McGeown, whose earnest goofiness steals her heart.

She does so with skill, combining unflinching authenticity with narrative dexterity and a flair for detail, all wrapped up in a moving love story – two, really. In Trespasses, her first novel, acclaimed short-story writer Louise Kennedy sets herself the challenge of encapsulating those unspeakable times and the powerlessness felt by ordinary people caught in the crossfire.

Trespasses a novel reviews