Born a few miles outside Belfast, she spent almost three decades working as a chef, before writing the stories that made up her first book, last year’s The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac. Kennedy, by her own account, came late to fiction writing. It is a story told with such compulsive attention to the textures of its world that every page feels like a moral and intellectual event.

Trespasses is a novel distinguished by a quality rare in fiction at any time: a sense of utter conviction. But after a very few pages have passed, it becomes clear how little any of this stuff – the traditional plot, the conventional telling – is relevant. In fact its mode is what you might call low-realist: the strain of dogged unromantic telling that descends from Ernest Hemingway and the early James Joyce through (in Ireland) writers such as Brian Moore and Colm Tóibín. This is not a book that is interested in performing radical aesthetic surgery on the realist novel.

Thus commences an affair that Cushla must keep secret from everyone, on pain – literally – of death. He invites Cushla to an “Irish language evening” with his bourgeois-bohemian friends, liberals who toy with pro-Republican politics. Michael is a Protestant barrister who defends young Catholic men who have been unjustly arrested. Here she meets Michael Agnew: handsome, middle-aged, sophisticated, married. She also does the odd shift in the family pub, which is frequented by leering and aggressive British soldiers. Cushla Lavery is 24 and works as a primary teacher in a school on the outskirts of Belfast. Plotwise, then, we’re in traditional territory.

Louise kennedy tresspasses