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schoolgirl Róisín McCaffrey has offered to act as go-between, ferrying letters between Tina, the meanest girl in her class, and fellow teenager Red (Redmond) Camelin. From their first encounter, Róisín is captivated by Red’s sharp wit, intelligence and devil-may-care attitude. The pair strike up a friendship and Red starts to spend more and more time at Róisín’s small, terraced house, welcomed by her single mother, Una. For reasons concealed, both from Róisín and the reader, the troubled Red avoids his own home and, when he gets into trouble with the law, he leaves Ireland to start a new life in London. Two years later, the pair will meet again


Trespasses Bloomsbury, £9.99, 9781526623362


“A first novel that reads nothing like one, this is a tender, fiercely beautiful story… Every finely grooved detail here feels authentic,” said the Sunday Times. “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 reader’s attention: after a while, you forget to exhale,” said the Irish Times.


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when Róisín travels to London to stay with her errant father for Christmas. But when she discovers her father is shacked up with a new girlfriend and new baby – Róisín’s half-sister – she storms off and tracks Red down to a squat in Pimlico. She moves in, desperately longing for more than just an intense friend- ship with Red, but he seems to be in thrall to something else, gravitating towards posh blonde English girl Octavia with whom he shares a connection that Róisín can only guess at.


in the 1980s for London, and encountering the previous wave of Irish immigrants. Young men who had left rural Ireland in the 1950s for London “digging and tunnelling and rebuilding Britain after the war. We saw them everywhere we went in the ’80s, but by that stage, most of them were just worn out. They weren’t fit to work anymore. A lot of them were absolutely in the grip of drink. They had been treated really badly”. “I suppose by the time we got here,


they were heading for 60 years old and just a lot of them were mad with loneliness and alcoholism and I suppose a sense of failure and isolation. And so, those people were very present then. And I couldn’t – I never, even at the time – I couldn’t think of them as fully separate from us. You know, we were better educated and probably very naively had great hopes for ourselves, but they were like us – or we were like them – in so many ways.” For Kennedy, London in the 1980s was still


[London in the 1980s] was really quite exhilarating, even though we were half starved. You’d have money for eyeliner and cider and cigarettes, but that was about it


Stations follows Róisín and Red, and Barry,


The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac Bloomsbury, £9.99, 9781526623317


“[A] dazzling, heartbreaking debut collection… With their sensitivity to people’s vulnerabilities and failings, and their sharpness of imagery, these 15 taut tales recall Annie Proulx at her best: salty, wise, droll and keen to share the lessons of a lifetime,” said the Guardian.


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another Irish friend who shares the squat, over the years. It is a story about loyalty and family, shame and regret as we follow these central characters, who Kennedy makes us care deeply about, weave in and out of each other’s lives. But Stations also tells a broader story: that of the Irish and their relationship to London. One of the most moving sections of the novel is just two pages long. It is 1985 and Róisín is at Victoria coach station, return- ing home to Ireland on a brief visit to see her mum, when she encounters an older Irish man in the pub next door who says he is catch- ing the same bus, but then does not. These few pages capture so much, so profoundly, about loss and home and exile. When we meet at her publisher’s central London offices, Kennedy tells me that was the very first bit of the novel she wrote. The “vignette”, as she calls it (“I hate that word, but I can’t think of a better one”) was written “within the first year or so that I started writing, maybe 2014. There wasn’t a lot I could really do with it because it’s a very short little thing, but it stayed with me”. When she wrote those original pages, and


then Stations, years later, Kennedy was draw- ing on her own experience of leaving Ireland


a great time, even if the move was forced by the economic conditions back home: “On the one hand, we were raging that we had to leave. At the same time, actually, we couldn’t do anything at home, and we knew that we were in one of the world’s great cities. It was really quite exhilarating, even though we were half starved. You’d have money for eyeliner and cider and cigarettes, but that was about it.” Stations spans 25 years, ending in 2007, the


peak of the Celtic Tiger era, a time of financial jubilance (“If you got in a taxi in Dublin, the driver would tell you about the three apart- ments he owned in Bulgaria. Like, we went mad. And a lot of that was a reaction to, I suppose, the lack of opportunity and the hopelessness of the 1980s”). She wrote the novel chronologically and was curious to see how her characters turned out: “I wanted to know, did they do well? How did they get on, these teenagers, three people in their late teens who were in a squat in London in the ’80s. What were they like, you know, at 40?”


R


óisín first appeared as a stroppy younger teenager in the short story Belladonna, from The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac but Kennedy felt she had “unfinished


business” with the character. In Stations, ageing Róisín from a 15-year-old was daunting: “She still has to be her. She still has the way that she thinks, the way that she speaks… it made me think about, like, do we change? Ultimately, I think that we don’t change as people, but we learn new things about the world and about other people and about how the world works.” Stations is a devastating read, about loss


and being lost, which will break your heart, but it is also very funny. Kennedy can always find the humour amid the bleakness. “Because what are you going to do? Like, throw yourself on the floor wailing?”


05


ALEXIS KIRSCHBAUM


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