Louise Kennedy’s first novel, Trespasses, was one of those rare triumphs, a debut that was not only rapturously received by critics but adored by readers around the world. A story of forbidden love set during the Troubles in 1970s Belfast, it was an international bestseller, translated into more than 20 languages. It was shortlisted for the 2023 Women’s prize and scooped debut fiction of the year at the British Book awards.
A four-part television adaptation with Gillian Anderson aired last autumn on Channel 4. Inevitably Kennedy found herself lauded as an overnight success – much was made of her 30-year career as a professional chef – but in fact she had been writing short stories for a decade and to considerable acclaim; her first collection, The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac, was published in 2021. Included in that book was Belladonna, the story of Róisín, a young girl from Belfast who moves south with her mother and, ostracised by her new classmates, becomes friendly with the couple who live across the road.
Like Briony Tallis in Ian McEwan’s Atonement, the prickly and precociously bright Róisín misinterprets the dynamic of her neighbours’ marriage to disastrous effect. It is a sucker-punch of a story, conjuring in a few restrained pages the violent insecurity and self-absorption of early adolescence. What a joy, then, to rediscover Róisín in the opening pages of Stations, Kennedy’s blisteringly good second novel.
It is 1982 and Róisín, still very much the outsider from the north, strikes up a fierce and unexpected friendship with Red, a boy with a reputation for trouble who is “spoken about in giddy whispers at school”. Róisín’s father, a drinker, has moved with his new wife to London. Red’s family is dysfunctional in ways Róisín only vaguely understands, but which come to a head when Red finds himself on the wrong side of the law.
Unable to stay, Red bolts to London. It is a year before Róisín, visiting her father for Christmas, finds herself caught up with him once again, the pull he exerts on her impossible to resist. The novel traces the warp and weft of their relationship over the next 25 years.
Structured like a sporadically kept diary, clusters of dated entries disrupted by long gaps, it has echoes of David Nicholls’s One Day; but Kennedy’s London is altogether grimmer and more brutal, a city of squats and gas heaters and not enough change for the payphone. Her people are also more damaged, an Irish diaspora fractured by displacement, scarred not only by poverty and violence and addiction but by shame and loss. However far they travel, they can never escape from themselves.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
