Kennedy draws the boundaries tight around her star-crossed pair, their momentary freedoms found on side roads and second homes, or in flight south across the Border. Together the two give Trespasses its dark energy, its relentlessness, its tragedy and its release, the terrible declensions of northern society rewritten in the lovers’ bodies, their affair a dramatisation of all that might have been had we only the tenderness to brave it. The story revolves around the relationship between Cushla Lavery, a schoolteacher still living at home with her alcoholic mother and working part-time in the family pub, and Michael Agnew, an arts-loving barrister unbalanced by his life’s long middle stretch. It is sensual too, and tragic, taut and unsparing of the binds that once held this fractured society in place. Set on the margins of Belfast in an uncertain time late in the last century, Trespasses is a troubled fiction, intimate, observant and ironic. Trespasses begins and ends with a chance meeting before a sculpture cast from one of its characters, and the pages between are the story of a humanity that is frail flesh and bloodied bone, battered by ideology and violence. The phrase is true to a book whose meaningful forms are made from the desires of the body and not the distractions of speech. It is so much easier to say nothing than to forget, observes a character in Louise Kennedy’s first novel.

Trespasses book louise kennedy