These include looking after her widowed mother, Gina, who is an alcoholic and sometimes can’t even get out of bed she’s so drunk or hungover working evenings in the pub run by her brother Eamonn and having to serve the clientele, some of which are British soldiers and taking an outside interest in the care of one of her young students, seven-year-old Davy McGeown, whose father is the victim of a particularly vicious attack by paramilitaries. He’s an Ulster protestant and works as a criminal barrister in Belfast.īut there are subsidiary storylines that showcase other aspects of Cushla’s life and go some way to explain why she’s embarked on a forbidden relationship. She’s from working-class Catholic stock and teaches at the local primary school. The main story is about Cushla’s clandestine relationship with Michael Agnew, an older married man she meets in the “garrison town” pub owned by her family. But maybe I’m being harsh - or too cynical. Throw in the complexities of their religious divide - she’s Catholic, he’s Protestant - class differences and a bloody and violent sectarian war playing out around them, then the chance of a happy-ever-after seems particularly far-fetched.
But as much as I enjoyed it on a superficial level, I found the storyline predictable and cliched.Īt one point, Cushla Lavery, the main character, tells her lover: “This is going to end badly, isn’t it?” And I wondered why it had taken her so long to figure it out because when a young woman falls for an older married man it never really ends well. Winner of the An Post Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year 2022 and shortlisted for a slew of other awards, Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses is the tale of a doomed love affair set in Northern Ireland during The Troubles.Įvery second person in the world seems to have read it - and loved it. Fiction – Kindle edition Bloomsbury Circus 320 pages 2022.
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