I adored Trespasses. I've never encountered a fictional novel that so accurately captures Northern Ireland during the Troubles - from the subtext that underlies everyday conversations to the pressure of knowing that your community is watching and judging. Louise Kennedy's style, full of intimacy and sparseness, sets the perfect tone for this sort of story.

Despite being a 'tough' read, it's a necessary one. Definitely the best book I've read in years

Not an easy book to read, but thought provoking. A must for anyone interested in this period of British history.

The author has a unique style, a real storyteller.

Thank you NetGalley.

An enjoyable read, which captures the Ireland of the period.
Not an exceptional read, a real page turner, but it wasn’t one to give up on early.

Sublime ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
'Trespasses' by Louise Kennedy is a gripping novel, sensitively-told and pitch-perfect!
Set near Belfast during the Troubles this is the story of a small community where division along sectarian lines poses a constant threat to personal freedom as Cushla Lavery, the young schoolteacher and main protagonist, learns to her downfall.
Thematically diverse it interconnects the poverty, fear, deprivation, brutality, misogyny, unemployment, violence and general despair that characterised daily life under siege. Kennedy writes beautifully contrasting the bleak News the seven-year old school children report each morning of bombings and beatings with a blossoming love story. But is this a society where it is safe to even fall in love?
This novel does not disappoint, in fact, it delivers on all fronts.

Oh my, what a writer Louise Kennedy is. She has such a unique style - so quiet, intimate, sensuous, tender, evocative. Her sentences are short on words, long on emotion. Her characters are so real, her dialogue almost painful to read at times. Her ability to capture a sense of time and place is spot on.

This is her debut novel and it has a quiet power that left me devastated. It tells the story of Cushla Lavery, a 24 year old Catholic primary school teacher in late 1970s Northern Ireland, who also helps her brother Eamonn at the family pub. Cushla meets Michael, an older Protestant married man who works as a barrister and is involved in the civil rights movement, railing against injustice and police brutality.

When one of Cushla’s pupil’s family runs into difficulty, Cushla begins to help out, with consequences that only begin to reveal themselves gradually.

There is an melancholy sadness and a seething anger that permeates this book - it is a book set during The Troubles after all - but there’s also a strong sense of longing, of yearning, for love, for happiness, for peace, for something better.

I was a big fan of Louise’s short story collection The End of the World is a Cul de Sac and I loved this every bit as much and more. Her descriptions of the relationship between Cushla and Michael, the awkward physicality, the depth of emotion - all of it is so perfectly rendered. It’s hard to shake that feeling of doom that hangs over the relationship. As a reader though, I was hanging on to hope for Cushla.

This is a triumph of a novel, a gorgeous, layered, emotional story that delivers on so many levels. I know that this book will stay with me for a long time to come. It’s early in the year but I’m already calling this for my Irish book of the year. 5/5 ⭐️

**Trespasses will be published on 14 April. Sincere thanks to the author, the publisher @bloomsburypublishing and @netgalley for an advance copy of this book. As always, this is an honest review.**

This book featured in the 2022 version of the influential annual Observer Best 10 Debut Novelist feature (past years have included Natasha Brown, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Douglas Stuart, Sally Rooney and Gail Honeyman among many others) and was also picked out by the New Statesman (and others) as one of the most anticipated debuts of 2022.

This is a tough read – both in style and subject matter.

Interestingly it is one with strong links to the difficult subject matters covered by two of the last four Booker winners (Anna Burns and Douglas Stuart), but at least for me without the more redemptive elements of their writing (Anna Burns brilliantly inventive narrative style and slightly surreal humour, and Douglas Stuart’s ability to weave empathy and hope into the darkest tales) – so that this is a grittier and more uncompromising novel.

The book is set in Northern Ireland in 1975 (with a brief but effective prologue and epilogue some 40 year later). The main protagonist Cushla Lavery is in her mid-20s and lives with her widowed and alcoholic mother in a small town near Belfast, both of them working part time in the nearby family pub run largely now by Cushla’s brother Eamonn. The Lavery’s are a lower middle-class Catholic family in a town which is largely Protestant (as is the clientele of their pub) but where sectarian tensions are lower than in Belfast.

Cushla teaches 7 year olds at a local Catholic school – each day with her class starting with them reporting to her (at her headmaster’s suggestion) what they have heard on the news – a catalogue of bombings, shootings and beatings which works as an effective introduction to many chapters. There she finds herself drawn to a quiet boy Davy. Davy is from a poor family, the marks of his poverty and his background (out of work Catholic father and unconverted Protestant mother – the children bought up as Catholics but living on a Protestant estate) making him something of an outcast. At the school Cushla tries to protect the children from the attempts of the local Priest to instill in them a sense of Original Sin, Damnation and of Protestant persecution. When Davy’s father is beaten up by a Protestant gang she draws closer to the family including Davy’s angry older brother Tommy.

At the pub she falls for a man – Michael, a barrister with outspoken views on Civil Rights – and despite him being unsuitable on at least three dimensions (Protestant, some 30 years older, married) the two conduct a sporadic and affair – which is largely hidden except to a group of Protestant friends that Michael meets up with, notionally to learn Irish, and who treat Cushla with something between hostility and condescension.

I cannot recall reading many books in 2021 that so well captures a sense of a particular place and time in history. This is a book full of local and period colour – although that colour was very much in my mind a mix of a kind of dark grey of both weather and mood, a 1970s beige-brown of food (the author was for many years a chef and she has a brilliant ability to convey mood and class via descriptions of ordinary meals) and clothes, with a heavy dose of oppressive army camouflage

Despite clearly setting out the issues of sectarianism, this is not a book which attempts to offer either a redemptive or moralistic answer to how to live in a society where democracy is compromised, everything from the justice system to the job market is rigged, the society is under a heavy military and paramilitary presence.

Cushla’s attempts at a kind of ecumenical approach to life: teaching at a catholic school but opposing what she sees as the excesses of the Priest; having an affair with a Protestant but making clear her issues with his friends anti-Catholic biases; her attempts to befriend everyone in the pub including RUC members; and her befriending of a mixed-religion family distrusted by both the Catholic priest and their Protestant neighbours – come across as initially naïve and ultimately rather disastrous in their consequences.

Similarly Michael’s attempt to work within the disputed legal framework but to fight against police and army injustice both causes his friends to despair at his risk taking and, as we later find out, manages to antogonise both the authorities and the paramilitaries – again with severe consequences.

Finally note that the book has something rather coincidentally in common with another of the Observer Top 10 Debut Novelists feature – “A Terrible Kindness” by Jo Browning Wroe also features a main character with the surname Lavery.

An interesting read. Not my usual type of read though. Thanks for the opportunity to read & review this book.

If books were colours, this would be grey. Maybe battleship grey, but still grey. Despite being set during the 1970s 'Troubles' in Belfast, it's a quiet, restrained book, muted in tone, perhaps to match the worn-down psyche of Cushla, the protagonist, a twenty-something teacher in a Catholic school just outside Belfast. With her dead father, her alcoholic mother, her brother who runs the family pub where she helps out in evenings, and the problems faced by the young children she teaches, Cushla is quietly desperate.

I like much of what this story does, especially the way it reveals the misogynist side of British army troops with their groping, touching and 'it's just a joke' verbal harassment of Cushla, alongside the more overt expressions of colonial power. And the central tragedy happens almost by accident or, at least, by a sort of negative serendipity rather than intentionality.

All the same, the mundane, commonplace tone that is the voice of the novel can become wearisome to read - I can understand it as an artistic choice but it can get dull. Readers who dislike narratives with no speech marks may want to avoid this. I think I admired what seems like social and historical authenticity more than enjoying this as a reading experience.

I adored Louise Kennedy’s collection of short stories “The End of the World is a Cul de Sac,” and as soon as I found out about her debut novel I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. This book did not leave me disappointed. Kennedy’s style of writing is magical with a power to captivate you from the very beginning.

Cushla Lavery is a twenty four year old woman who splits her time between teaching and bartending at her family’s bar. Living in Northern Ireland she has witnessed and experienced the brutality of life during The Troubles. During one of her shifts at the bar Cushla meets Michael Agnew, a prominent barrister who isn’t afraid to fight against the political injustice. After a father of one of the boys in her class is savagely attacked, she works to help the boy and his family through the difficult time that follows.

This book blew me away at times, it is an unflinching and brutal portrayal of life in Northern Ireland. Kennedy does not shy away from sharing the turbulent and heartbreaking history of life during these times with daily news of beatings, murders, bombings, and so much more. To read of seven-year-olds reporting of these tragedies in school each day is deeply powerful and painful. I was devastated when I finished this book and I am still left thinking about it days later.