The unforgettable new novel from the no. 1 bestselling, Women's Prize-shortlisted author of Trespasses – a devastating tale of love, friendship, and the choices that shape our lives

**FROM THE PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF TRESPASSES **

A BOOK OF THE AUTUMN IN THE TIMES, GUARDIAN, IRISH TIMES, IRISH EXAMINER, COUNTRY & TOWNHOUSE AND MORE

'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
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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.
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'A beautiful novel about loss and being lost' NICK HORNBY
'I loved it for the way it holds a national sorrow' ANNE ENRIGHT
'Heartbreakingly real and utterly compelling' ROISÍN O'DONNELL

Details

ISBN13: 9781526664334
Format: Paperback / softback
Number of Pages: 304
Edition:
Publication Date:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publication City, Country: London, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 23.2(H)x15.2(L)x2.6(W)380
Weight (gm): 380

Author Biography

LOUISE KENNEDY grew up a few miles from Belfast. She is the author of the acclaimed short-story collection, The End of the World is a Cul de Sac, which won the John McGahern Prize. Her debut novel Trespasses has been translated into over twenty languages. A Sunday Times bestseller, it won Eason Novel of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards, Book of the Year for Debut Fiction at the British Book Awards and the McKitterick Prize. It was also shortlisted for several awards including the Women's Prize for Fiction, the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize. In 2025, Trespasses was made into a limited TV series by Channel 4. Before starting her writing career, Kennedy spent nearly thirty years working as a chef. She lives in Sligo.

Reviews

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. -- Min Jin Lee, bestselling author of PACHINKO
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. -- Liz Nugent, bestselling author of STRANGE SALLY DIAMOND
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. -- Timothy O'Grady, author of I COULD READ THE SKY
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 -- Garrett Carr, author of THE BOY FROM THE SEA
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 -- Madeleine Feeney * 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 -- Alice O'Keeffe * 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 -- Laura Hackett * 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 *