Immersive, profound, and written with a scalpel's precision, Louise Kennedy's follow-up to her debut novel, Trespasses, has the emotional impact of an imploding star. Set in a small town in Northern Ireland and in London between the 1980s and early 2000s, Stations follows the complicated relationship between teenagers Róisín and Red, whose close connection looms over them even as their paths diverge. Drawn together by their sense of alienation in a town where everyone knows their business, Róisín and Red have a bond deeper and more intense than either friendship or romance. For Róisín, especially, it feels fated. Compelled both by her longing for him and her need to escape the confines of Northern Ireland, Róisín follows Red to London. It is there, in a squalid squat inhabited by several other shiftless drifters, that their relationship begins to fracture as the choices they each make drive them apart. For troubled Red, there is a precipitous fall into drug addiction and homelessness. Róisín, who will ultimately be haunted by her inability to save Red, gradually reconciles with her family and the community she left behind even while toughing it out in a city that seems to reject her.
Kennedy's plot is deceptively simple, a perfect balance for her layered, complex protagonists. Even the characters with only walk-on parts feel fully inhabited, their tragedies, loves, and struggles evoked with such authentic detail that, by the novel's close, readers have experienced them as well. Stations is an exquisitely rendered novel by an author with an uncanny understanding of the human heart. --Debra Ginsberg, author and freelance editor