Everyone of my generation in the UK knows what is meant by the Troubles, but it’s a term we have to explain to our children. The sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland was never far from the surface when I was growing up. Most evenings the television news featured some new atrocity. A car bomb, a random murder, a punishment beating, sometimes indiscriminate violence inflicted by the British army, the Irish Republicans, or one of the many Loyalist groups. Occasionally the mayhem spread beyond the borders of Northern Ireland, as it did when Lord Mountbatten was murdered off the coast of the Irish republic or when a hotel bomb in Brighton narrowly missed Margaret Thatcher.

The Troubles are not just the backdrop to Louise Kennedy’s fine novel, Trespasses. They are intrinsic to every episode and every conversation, and as present and unavoidable in the lives of its characters as their pulses and heartbeats. Cushla Laverty is a Catholic and teaches in a local school in Belfast. She helps out when she can behind the bar of the pub her family owns. It’s a pub that includes Protestants among its customers, and one of them is Michael Agnew, a well known attorney. The two start an intense relationship that cuts across religious, class, and political divisions. Trouble is certain.

Kennedy writes beautifully, and not just about families, love, and divisiveness. She gives us real human beings, vividly and convincingly. Cushla’s alcoholic mother, Michael’s snobbish middle class friends, and most of all schoolchildren in all their wonderful innocence. Trespasses is something special.