Stations
- Author Louise Kennedy
- Narrator Brid Brennan
- Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
- Publish Date 24 September 2026
- Run Time 9 hours and 18 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Modern and contemporary fiction.
Flexible Pricing & Rewards For Listening
At xigxag, the more you read, the less you pay* on select audiobook and x-book® titles, as in the table below. Pricing updates automatically in the app and resets one year after your first purchase. And you can always find a selection of brilliant titles available for only £3.99.
Titles Purchased
- 1-5
- 6-10
- 11-15
- 16-20
- Over 20
Price per title
- £8.99
- £7.99
- £6.99
- £5.99
- £4.99
*Only the full price titles you buy count toward your personal pricing tier. Full price titles don’t include Listen for Less or other books bought with a voucher or discount code.
Listen to a sample
What to expect
Bloomsbury presents Stations by Louise Kennedy, read by Bríd Brennan.
FROM THE PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF TRESPASSES
'I loved it for the way it holds a national sorrow' ANNE ENRIGHT
'Moving, compassionate, a touching love story' DAVID NICHOLLS
'I gulped this down - convinced, fascinated and moved by every page' EMMA DONOGHUE
'A transcendent exploration of yearning, transformation and rescue' MIN JIN LEE
_____
Róisín and Red meet as teenagers in their small Irish hometown in 1982. Brilliant, sharp-tongued and born to slip through the cracks, Red’s reputation for trouble precedes him – but Róisín finds herself swept up in his storm, and soon their connection deepens.
When a brush with the law pushes Red into a corner, he escapes their town to start a new life in England. As the years pass, they remain tethered to one another, a fragile thread holding their once fierce friendship together. When Róisín arrives in London, the promise of freedom, of reinvention, and of finding her dear friend calls.
But searching for Red leads Róisín to a truth darker than she could have imagined: when you go looking for someone you may uncover parts of yourself along the way that you’d rather stayed buried. And Red – bright, beautiful Red – might not want to be found at all.
Stations is a devastating story of love and friendship, and a tender portrait of the choices we blithely make when we are young, unaware that the consequences will reverberate throughout our lives.
_____
'A beautiful novel about loss and being lost' NICK HORNBY
'Heartbreakingly real and utterly compelling' ROISÍN O'DONNELL
'One of the most gifted storytellers in contemporary Irish fiction' ELAINE FEENEY
FROM THE PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF TRESPASSES
'I loved it for the way it holds a national sorrow' ANNE ENRIGHT
'Moving, compassionate, a touching love story' DAVID NICHOLLS
'I gulped this down - convinced, fascinated and moved by every page' EMMA DONOGHUE
'A transcendent exploration of yearning, transformation and rescue' MIN JIN LEE
_____
Róisín and Red meet as teenagers in their small Irish hometown in 1982. Brilliant, sharp-tongued and born to slip through the cracks, Red’s reputation for trouble precedes him – but Róisín finds herself swept up in his storm, and soon their connection deepens.
When a brush with the law pushes Red into a corner, he escapes their town to start a new life in England. As the years pass, they remain tethered to one another, a fragile thread holding their once fierce friendship together. When Róisín arrives in London, the promise of freedom, of reinvention, and of finding her dear friend calls.
But searching for Red leads Róisín to a truth darker than she could have imagined: when you go looking for someone you may uncover parts of yourself along the way that you’d rather stayed buried. And Red – bright, beautiful Red – might not want to be found at all.
Stations is a devastating story of love and friendship, and a tender portrait of the choices we blithely make when we are young, unaware that the consequences will reverberate throughout our lives.
_____
'A beautiful novel about loss and being lost' NICK HORNBY
'Heartbreakingly real and utterly compelling' ROISÍN O'DONNELL
'One of the most gifted storytellers in contemporary Irish fiction' ELAINE FEENEY
Critics Review
Louise Kennedy’s brilliant Stations is a moving and immersive novel about first love, addiction, and regret. Smart, propulsive, and emotionally powerful, this narrative is a transcendent exploration of yearning, transformation and rescue.
What a beautiful book ... Róisín’s quest for the love of a man who can never reciprocate her own obsessive passion is an odyssey of its own. Stations will live in my head for a long time to come.
This is the story of a profound, ambiguous love, spanning decades, between two wounded emigrants adrift in London. Place and feeling are uncannily tangible. It's funny, perceptive, carnal, laced with startling sentences and tremendously absorbing and revealing. Any time I was away from it I missed it.
Stations takes hold from the first page, it’s all raw and it’s all true. You’re pitched straight into the story, heart-first. Only later does the social history in the novel occur to you: in vivid scenes Stations reconstructs a time when work on an English building site was the expectation of thousands of young Irish men. It would’ve been my expectation too, probably, had I been born ten years earlier. I don’t think there has ever been a better examination of Ireland’s relationship to London; a place to where the Irish were often pulled by their ambition, or pushed by their regrets
A deeply moving portrait of love's many faces, Stations is at once vivid and panoramic, an elegiac and clear-eyed exploration of intimacy in all its life-saving power and devastating limitations
I gulped this down - convinced, fascinated, and moved by every page
Louise Kennedy can make your heart ache like few others – her magic lies in creating characters who are warm, living, breathing, utterly real. The story of Róisín and Red, the star-crossed couple at the centre of Stations, and the novel’s wider generational sadnesses of displacement and loss, left me profoundly moved
Stations is a beautiful novel about loss and being lost; at its centre is a brilliantly drawn collection of found family, memorable people with their own ornately-carved crosses to bear. But it’s also about another lost Irish generation, driven away by the politics and poverty that has blighted their island for so much of its history
Louise Kennedy's writing is full of life and the kind of observations that are all too confronting. Stations is funny and moving and unexpected
Kennedy has well and truly delivered with this piercing story of romantic longing and confusing friendship; loyalty, betrayal and guilt; and the hidden damage we are sometimes afraid to confront. As ever, her writing is as urgent and unsentimental as it is heart-breaking
You can love Stations for the grit and nuance of Róisín’s voice and for the ‘heart-scalding’ story she has to tell, but I loved it for the way it holds a national sorrow. Barry, Red, Muiris are some of Ireland’s many lost boys, and this book is a lovely work of mourning and reclamation
A novel that gives proper weight and dignity to the lives of people we walk past every day without a thought. Moving, compassionate, a touching love story, a wonderful evocation of time and place
Surely a Booker contender … A story about loyalty and family, shame and regret … Stations is a devastating read, about loss and being lost, which will break your heart, but it is also very funny. Kennedy can always find the humour in the bleakness
Stations is a stunning second novel - a work of extraordinary emotional power that explores love, loss, reinvention, regret, emigration, and the enduring hold of the Irish childhood in all its complexity. This gripping tale of Róisín and Red, moving from Irish teenagers through to messy adult lives in London, is rendered with tenderness, precision, and aching humanity. Kennedy writes with remarkable compassion, and in Stations she has created another unforgettable novel that confirms her as one of the most gifted story-tellers in contemporary Irish fiction
Bold and unflinching, Stations is a masterfully observed novel written with Louise Kennedy's trademark candour. Here are characters who live and breathe on the page, making their story both heartbreakingly real and utterly compelling
Stations is at heart a story about longing and regret for the decisions we've made and the people we've abandoned along the way. The writing is direct and unadorned, but carries a great emotional weight, and the excavation of the diasporic experience at the core of this beautiful novel shines a light on the many lost souls throughout Irish history who have been forced to make lives for themselves elsewhere, those who succeed and those who slip through the cracks, and treats their stories with such humanity and care. It's a tender, atmospheric work, imbued with a sharp and often unpredictable humour that's become a feature of Kennedy's writing, and makes it such a joy to read and be swept along by her seemingly innate ability to tell a powerful and engaging story
The friendship Kennedy depicts moved me enormously. It’s funny and unexpected
| Author | Louise Kennedy |
|---|---|
| Narrator | Brid Brennan |
| Duration | 9 hours and 18 minutes |
| Release Date | |
| ISBN | 9781526664341 |
| Format | Audiobook |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Genre | Modern and contemporary fiction |
| Collections | September Stories |
| Availability | AU, GB, IE |
More from the same
About xigxag
xigxag is an independent, UK-based audiobook platform and the UK’s only B Corp certified audiobook company. We offer nearly 150,000 audiobooks, all with professional human narration. No AI-generated voices. xigxag is rated an Ethical Consumer Best Buy for audiobooks and a top-rated ethical bookshop.
There is no subscription. You buy the audiobooks you want, you own them permanently, and prices start at £8.99. The more you listen over the year, the less you pay per book, and there is always a selection in Listen for Less from £3.99. You can also send audiobooks as gifts using our audiobook gift cards or in-app gifting.
Every audiobook on xigxag has honest reviews covering both the book and the narration, and our community features make it easy to share what you are listening to, discover what others recommend, and find your next listen.
Download or stream on iOS, Android, or in your browser. Browse the full catalogue at xigxag.co.uk.