![]() ![]() Kennedy describes their upper-middle-class bohemian way of life in perfect detail, the delicious, casually presented meals, the vintage doodads that ornament the kitchen, the polite, but condescending manner of most of them toward Cushla. ![]() Michael asks Cushla to tutor him and a few of his well-heeled, liberal-minded Protestant friends who meet weekly to learn the Irish language - or, as one of Cushla's friends would have it, playing "at being Irish once a week." It is there that she meets Michael, a man infamous for taking on the defense of young Catholic men accused of crimes against the state, including murder. The boy is bullied at school and lives a persecuted existence with his brother, sister, Protestant mother and Catholic father in a hardline Protestant council-house development.Ĭushla lives with her widowed, alcoholic mother and regularly helps out in the family's pub. ![]() Running alongside that entanglement - and joining it in tragedy toward the end - is Cushla's unlucky effort to help and protect one of her students, 7-year-old Davy. Set in and around Belfast in 1975, in the midst of the Troubles, it follows the course of a passionate affair between Cushla Lavery, a 24-year-old Catholic primary school teacher, and Michael Agnew, a married Protestant barrister in his 50s. Louise Kennedy, whose 2021 collection of short stories, "The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac," has won the John McGahern Prize for a debut book of Irish fiction, now gives us "Trespasses," her first novel. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |