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 ... Roisin'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 Roisin 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 Roisin'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 ..