Stations

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

Colin Walsh, author of KALA

I gulped this down - convinced, fascinated, and moved by every page

Emma Donoghue, author of ROOM

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

Lucy Caldwell, author of INTIMACIES

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

Nick Hornby

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

Alan Murrin, author of THE COAST ROAD

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

The Bookseller

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

Anne Enright, author of THE GATHERING

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

David Nicholls, bestselling author of ONE DAY

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

The Bookseller

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

Elaine Feeney, author of LET ME GO MAD IN MY OWN WAY

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

Roisín O'Donnell, author of NESTING

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

Michael Magee, author of CLOSE TO HOME

The friendship Kennedy depicts moved me enormously. It’s funny and unexpected

Gillian Anderson

Stunning … exquisitely written

Good Housekeeping

A touching tale of friendship, spanning rural Ireland and London

Red

Following her multi-award-winning debut Trespasses, Kennedy has got even better … A heart-wrenching read

i Paper

A haunting tale of love and friendship set in rural Ireland

Independent

When reading Stations, you are in the hands of an author who is able to move beyond her memory stores and flex her literary muscles. She extends her time frame from months to decades, creates a host of fleshed-out secondary characters and manages to insert allusions to everyone from Plato to Hogarth to Patrick Kavanagh without ever seeming to have, as Róisín would put it, “Wanker tattooed on [her] forehead”. And despite this great expansion, Kennedy continues to do what she does best. Humour, for one thing … The emotional power in this book comes from Kennedy’s focus on the Irish exiles in London

The Times

The intimacy of Kennedy’s storytelling, her empathy and warmth for her characters on their journey to hard-won wisdom and painful self-knowledge, is unparalleled

Daily Mail

The heir to Edna O’Brien … Every bit as devastating, skilful and alive as her lauded debut novel … A masterwork … Brutal and perfect

Irish Times

Heart-breaking and painfully truthful, it’s a tough, tender look at an almost impossible friendship

Mail on Sunday

An astute, emotionally charged novel that examines the lasting effects of first love

Economist

Kennedy succeeds in engaging sympathy for Roísín despite her determined attempts to sabotage herself, revealing a world of pain in a few understated words, while delivering her story with wit and humour against a background of pitch perfect ‘80s small town Ireland and London

A Life in Books

Louise Kennedy at her touching, unflinching best

Sainsbury's Magazine

Kennedy’s blisteringly good second novel … It has echoes of David Nicholls’s One Day; but Kennedy’s London is altogether grimmer and more brutal … Kennedy moved to London herself as a young woman and evokes the 1980s city with almost hallucinogenic precision, but her greater power lies in her remarkable humanity. Her characters are messy, flawed, often shatteringly self-destructive but, mapped with her fierce compassion, they march straight off the page … Stations is at its heart a love story, a furious, tender, potty-mouthed paean to loyalty and generosity of spirit. It is also an elegy to a generation of lost Irish boys, a heart-breaking testament to the violence and fear passed down from father to son … Her questions will burn themselves into your heart

Guardian, Book of the Day

The Trespasses author captures with fino dry wit the path of would-be lovers … She is particularly good at implying the psychology of her characters - especially the parts they fail to understand themselves... [and] remembering, and recreating, the teeming emotional complexities of youth

Financial Times

Beautiful … packing a hugely emotional punch it’s genuinely hard to put down

Heat

An empathetic dive into battling for your place in the world

Grazia

A beautiful story that you won’t be able to stop thinking about

Dawn O'Porter Radio Times Book Club

A delicate and complicated love story … Stations displays the assurance of a novelist far further into her career, particularly in the way it trusts readers to sit with ambiguity and what remains unsaid

Radio Times

Kennedy has gratifying confidence in her readers' ability to pick up the story's threads, matched by her superb command of the material texture of everyday life and the distinctive rhythms of Irish and English speech. Fans of Trespasses who enjoyed the sharp-witted sarcasm of its protagonist, Cushla, will find Roisin equally good company, and the emotional observation is unsparing and often hilarious … Full of startling insight and rich in social detail, this exceptionally strong second novel emphatically confirms Kennedy's place in the front rank of Irish fiction

Times Literary Supplement

Louise Kennedy is canny, particularly when it comes to the emotional undercurrent of her characters’ behaviour ... Kennedy excels at evoking London’s less salubrious side … Kennedy has pulled off a fine balancing act, moving forwards while bringing her readers with her

Literary Review