A gripping tale of love across the divide, Trespasses – which has been shortlisted for this year’s Women’s prize – is the debut novel of Louise Kennedy, a former chef who began writing in her mid 40s. Set in a garrison town near Belfast in 1975, it revolves around 24-year-old Cushla Lavery, a Catholic primary school teacher who also helps out behind the bar at the family pub. There she meets Michael Agnew, a married Protestant barrister who is twice her age and who defends Catholic men he believes have been unjustly arrested.
The two begin an affair that unfolds against a backdrop of sectarian violence. Every day, Cushla watches her prison officer neighbour comb his car for explosives; at school, the headteacher insists pupils look at the news headlines, which read as an inventory of human brutality. “Booby trap. Incendiary device. Gelignite. Nitroglycerine. Petrol bomb. Rubber bullets … The vocabulary of a seven-year-old child now.”
