Yet he still gets sucked into identity-based ways of thinking and ends up sounding like a creep. He is in the mould of a ‘lefty lawyer’, with a civil-rights-movement past and a record of going after police brutality. Michael is more charming and less chauvinistic. Propaganda, said Victor, his eyes on Michael. Victor, the most snobbish of the group, singles Cushla out for her background and asks her to translate a series of words: Cushla soon realises that she is their ‘token Taig’. Identity is everything, from the moment when Michael proposes a date with Cushla, not at a bar or a cinema but at his Irish-language class, held in the dining room of a well-to-do friend’s house and attended by vino-sipping sophisticates. Not one of these details proves insignificant in the course of this novel. He is posh, Protestant, married and a barrister. This nasty experience at the bar leads Cushla into a friendship with Michael Agnew. The title of the novel is both a synonym for ‘intrusions’ and a direct quote from the most penitential line of the Lord’s Prayer. It is a book that very delicately captures the everyday workings of oppressive judgement and its inseparable companion, shame.

In terms of invasive behaviour this is the thin end of the wedge: in Louise Kennedy’s debut novel, no one is left alone, no business is private and no one goes unscrutinised. Within a few pages, one of the squaddies has ‘laid his hand on her hips, just above her arse’. To help out with the family business, a pub frequented by soldiers and Protestants, she works part-time as a barmaid. Cushla Lavery, the protagonist, is a young Catholic teacher living on the outskirts of Belfast in the mid-1970s.

Louise kennedy trespasses review