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.
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