Stations

Reviews / Votes

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 and Free Food for Millionaires * 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 and The Wonder * 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 and These Days * 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 *