Louise Kennedy arrives slightly late to our planned Zoom call, but thoroughly apologetic; right when she was ready to chat, her Firefox browser started to update, “and then everything started crashing”, she explains, waving her arms around to signal that everything around her was, indeed, crashing.

While it’s a slightly chaotic start to the interview, it’s a charming one, and Kennedy’s infectious personality shines through from the off. The Irish author is joining me to promote her second novel, Stations, a delicate and complicated love story set across Ireland and London in the 1980s. We follow Róisín, a teenager yearning for connection, but never quite speaking her truth. At the centre of her world is classmate Red, whose future hinges on a single moment.

Kennedy has been sitting with this story far longer than readers might expect. Róisín first appeared in Belladonna, a short story published in her collection
The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac. She laughs: “Róisín came out of the womb stroppy, a bit difficult, and fighting with everybody.

In 1981, she’s fighting with everyone, but she doesn’t really have any friends. So, in Stations, I gave her a friend. I guess I felt I had unfinished business with her.”

It’s easy to assume Kennedy has been publishing for decades. 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.

Kennedy’s previous 30-year career as a chef perhaps explains some of the novel’s sensory richness. Like an experienced cook, Kennedy knows what to leave out. Stations is a novel built as much on implication as revelation, with readers forced to infer much of what lies beneath the surface.

That ambiguity is most evident in the character of Red. Kennedy is careful never to fully reveal him to the reader and instead, we’re limited by Róisín’s perspective and understanding of events. “She only knows what she knows,” Kennedy explains, meaning that the novel becomes less about whether two people will end up together and more about misunderstanding, missed opportunity and truths we can only recognise with hindsight.

Stations also draws on aspects of Kennedy’s own life. Though she’s quick to insist Róisín is not autobiographical, the two share notable similarities. Like her character, Kennedy moved south after leaving Northern Ireland as a child and remembers the period with a striking clarity that saturates every page of the novel.

“It was terrifyingly easy for me to drop myself into a town in the Midlands of Ireland in 1982,” she says. “I could nearly smell the tables in the classroom and the smelly trainers from the lockers.”

The push and pull of emigration Kennedy experienced also runs through Stations. She remembers a generation frustrated by Ireland’s economic
struggles and social restrictions, while simultaneously being drawn into the freedom and possibility offered by London. Kennedy remembers: “We did carry that kind of colonial resentment, but also, we got to London and we realised we were in one of the world’s great cities – it was bloody great.”

While Róisín’s life has many differences to her own, writing gave Kennedy an opportunity to revisit a formative period in her life.

“What surprised me is that loads of people tell me Stations is devastating and heartbreaking, but I mean, I was laughing as I wrote some of it! I hope people see that it’s funny as well,” she admits. “Irish people are really, really good at not saying what they mean, and I think that it comes out in other ways where it would be banter or sarcasm.” However, revisiting the period was emotional, too, she says, drawing on painful memories and the losses that inevitably accumulate with age.

Revisiting the past wasn’t the only challenge Kennedy faced. Following the success of her critically acclaimed debut, Trespasses (made into a 2025 Channel 4 drama starring Lola Petticrew, Tom Cullen and Gillian Anderson), writing a second novel brought its own pressures. “The usual pattern would be that I would approach my laptop and feel like I was going to throw up,” she admits. “But then I’d open it and get a few sentences in and I’d be all right. The trick is just to turn up.”

Deceptively simple advice, it seems, but it reflects her practical approach to writing, every book presenting her with a new set of challenges.

Kennedy admits she may not have set out to write the social history of Ireland in the 1980s, but Stations captures a generation shaped by emigration, silence and missed opportunities. It’s a novel interested in the things left unsaid, the people we misunderstand and the regrets we carry long after youth has passed. That it is also funny, warm and deeply humane feels entirely fitting coming from its author.

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