Born a few miles outside Belfast, she spent almost three decades working as a chef, before writing the stories that made up her first book, last year’s The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac. Kennedy, by her own account, came late to fiction writing. It is a story told with such compulsive attention to the textures of its world that every page feels like a moral and intellectual event. Trespasses is a novel distinguished by a quality rare in fiction at any time: a sense of utter conviction. But after a very few pages have passed, it becomes clear how little any of this stuff – the traditional plot, the conventional telling – is relevant. In fact its mode is what you might call low-realist: the strain of dogged unromantic telling that descends from Ernest Hemingway and the early James Joyce through (in Ireland) writers such as Brian Moore and Colm Tóibín. This is not a book that is interested in performing radical aesthetic surgery on the realist novel. Thus commences an affair that Cushla must keep secret from everyone, on pain – literally – of death. He invites Cushla to an “Irish language evening” with his bourgeois-bohemian friends, liberals who toy with pro-Republican politics. Michael is a Protestant barrister who defends young Catholic men who have been unjustly arrested. Here she meets Michael Agnew: handsome, middle-aged, sophisticated, married. She also does the odd shift in the family pub, which is frequented by leering and aggressive British soldiers. Cushla Lavery is 24 and works as a primary teacher in a school on the outskirts of Belfast. Plotwise, then, we’re in traditional territory.

In this case an attractive married lawyer who’s committed to civil rights for Catholics.” “Do things go tragically wrong for sectarian reasons?” “It is strongly intimated that this is what will happen, yes.” Her dad is dead when the book begins.” “Does she fall in love with a Protestant?” “Well, yes, she does fall in love with a Protestant, as it happens. It’s easy to imagine a conversation about Louise Kennedy’s debut novel, Trespasses, that goes something like this: “What’s it about?” “Well, it’s about a young Catholic woman in Belfast in the 70s, at the height of the Troubles.” “Punishment beatings, bomb scares, all of that?” “Yes, all of that.” “Does her dad die?” “Well, yes, actually.

Louise kennedy books