'Louise Kennedy's Trespasses touches tenderly and hits hard - a compulsively readable love story which is also a lament for a society agonizingly divided against itself. Pitch-perfect in its evocation of its time and place, unflinching in the rawness of its longing, Trespasses is an extraordinary read - it will break your heart.' - Lucy Caldwell 'I hardly have words for how viscerally this book affected me, how much it moved me. It feels true and honest, heartbreaking and tender. writes beautifully about love, awkward love, love between two people who the more censorious in our midst might say have no business being in love. As tender as it is unflinching, Trespasses is a heart-pounding, heart-rending drama of thwarted love and irreconcilable loyalties, in a place what you come from seems to count more than what you do, or whom you cherish. Then the father of a student is savagely beaten, setting in motion a chain reaction that will threaten everything, and everyone, Cushla most wants to protect.

Against her better judgment – Michael is not only Protestant but older, and married – Cushla lets herself get drawn in by him and his sophisticated world, and an affair ignites. There she meets Michael Agnew, a barrister who’s made a name for himself defending IRA members. By day she teaches at a parochial school at night she fills in at her family’s pub. Amid daily reports of violence, Cushla lives a quiet life with her mother in a small town near Belfast. ” -Oprah Daily Set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a shattering novel about a young woman caught between allegiance to community and a dangerous passion.

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION “Brilliant, beautiful, heartbreaking.”-J.Courtney Sullivan, New York Times Book Review “ TRESPASSES vaults Kennedy into the ranks of such contemporary masters as McCann, Claire Keegan, Colin Barrett, and fellow Sligo resident, Kevin Barry.

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