Always Tell the Love Stories

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. But in her first novel, Trespasses, the Irish writer Louise Kennedy doesn’t shy away from either fun or femininity. Nor does Kennedy avert her eyes from the Troubles, the era during which her novel is set. 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. 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.