Cushla, for her part, learned the language in college she grew up in a small town near Belfast and works nights at the bar that her family owns. One of its first big scenes takes place at a dinner party in Belfast, where a young teacher named Cushla arrives to instruct a group of Protestant intellectuals in the Irish language, generally seen as the domain of Catholics like her. Read: How conflicts end-and who can end themĮarly in the novel, Kennedy makes clear to readers that this will not be the sweeping, overtly tragic wartime love story to which we may be accustomed. In telling a fully realized romance that is also a fully realized story of the Troubles, she demonstrates how artificial it is for fiction to divide love and war. By attending to romance and courtship, and by writing about beatings and bombings alongside gossip and domestic detail, Kennedy refuses to shrink or ignore any part of her characters’ lives. Nor does Kennedy avert her eyes from the Troubles, the era during which her novel is set. But in her first novel, Trespasses, the Irish writer Louise Kennedy doesn’t shy away from either fun or femininity. Of course, this rarity is rooted in old, gendered ideas about literary subject matter: Combat and the romantic separation it can cause are (supposedly) serious fodder for male writers, while flirtation and anticipation-the fun parts of coupling up-are not.

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. Not many novels mix juicy romance and wartime violence.

Trespasses a novel reviews