Trespasses by Louise Kennedy

A deftly woven novel, which I think will astonish you
Bella Mackie, Women’s Prize for Fiction 2023, judges comments

Sometimes you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. This is an unashamedly conventional realist novel, but such an exceptional one that it’s bound to rekindle even the most cynical reader’s appreciation of the form . . . Spellbindingly, heartbreakingly unforgettable
Daily Mail, Books of the Year

Not many novels mix juicy romance and wartime violence. War-induced longing is a common fictional occurrence – consider Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong, or, to a lesser degree, Ian McEwan’s Atonement – but a vivid, sexy, not-doomed-feeling love story that also takes a war zone as a central subject rather than simply a setting is rarer
Atlantic

A first novel that reads nothing like one, this is a tender, fiercely beautiful story . . . Every finely grooved detail here feels authentic’
Sunday Times, Books of the Year

Hands down the best book this year was Trespasses by Louise Kennedy. There has been praise for Kennedy’s eye in recreating the Belfast of the mid-70s, but it is the precision of the emotional detail that holds the readers attention: after a while, you forget to exhale
Anne Enright, Irish Times, Books of the Year

We know that civil wars are made up of thousands of small tragedies. But I know few novels that convey the grim predictability of everyday violence during that period so well. Kennedy’s careful attention is a welcome counter to Brexit’s careless disregard of lives and loves lost
New Statesman, Books of the Year

Brilliant, beautiful, heartbreaking . . . I am not a crier, but by the final pages of Trespasses I was in tears. It’s a testament to Kennedy’s talents that we come to love and care so much about her characters
New York Times Book Review

Thrilling, wise, and moving, Trespasses is a remarkable novel about the wages of love in a time marked by brutality, strife, and above all, a will to hope. A totally absorbing read
Brandon Taylor, author of REAL LIFE and FILTHY ANIMALS

Absorbing . . . Wise far beyond its first book status, Trespasses vaults Kennedy into the ranks of such contemporary masters as McCann, Claire Keegan, Colin Barrett, and fellow Sligo resident, Kevin Barry
Oprah Daily

Brilliantly depicted . . . Kennedy has written a captivating first novel which manages to be beautiful and devastating in equal measure
Washington Post

Kennedy’s powerful writing, tragic humour and vivid characters will move and haunt you
San Francisco Chronicle

When I want help there’s non-fiction but when I want truth, I go to fiction . . . Louise Kennedy has smashed it out the park with Trespasses. This is a love story for people that would normally watch political thrillers or historical thrillers . . . You can feel the cigarette smoke, you can taste the Irish stew bubbling, you can feel the carpet, and the tension ratchets. It’s plotty, it’s scary, it’s full of eroticism, it’s like Sally Rooney mixed with a political thriller. I love it
Russell Kane, Steph’s Packed Lunch

Kennedy has an impressively light touch for so heavy a subject, writing with a savage beauty about a brutal era . . . Trespasses is not a story that can end well, not in 70s Belfast. But it is testament to Kennedy’s power as a storyteller that she makes us think it might. An exceptional debut
i

Heart-wrenching . . . If the pervading tenor of Kennedy’s stories is one of resignation, Trespasses is all the more moving for allowing its protagonists to hope . . . Historical fiction at its finest
Financial Times

The wonder of the book is that its unassumingly arrow-like narrative can fold so much into its layers: at once intimate and political, it’s a love story, a crime drama and a state-of-the-nation period snapshot. Kennedy manages the tension expertly, steadily steering us to an explosive climax with no frills
Daily Mail