Her entry begins:
I’ve just finished reading Trespasses, a debut novel by Louise Kennedy. Let me divide my comments in two, addressing first plot and then language. The story is set in Belfast during the 1970s, a time of bitter division between Protestants and Catholics, when violence of all sorts was the rule.About Leaving, from the publisher:
Cushla, the protagonist, is a teacher in her 20s, her family riven by the death of her father, the alcoholism of her mother, the knife-edge of politics that imperil her brother’s bar. She meets a lawyer twice her age, married, idealistic, and deeply embroiled in the Troubles. Cushla tries to care for her doomed mother, her desperate brother, her small students, while she becomes more and more engaged by her love affair with the lawyer. Irish stories are not often light-hearted, the endings are often dark, and so it is with this one.
But you should read it. Kennedy’s sentences are...[read on]
What risks would you be willing to take to fall in love again?Visit Roxana Robinson’s website.
“I never thought I’d see you here,” Sarah says. Then she adds, “But I never thought I’d see you anywhere.”
Sarah and Warren’s college love story ended in a single moment. Decades later, when a chance meeting brings them together, a passion ignites―threatening thefoundations of the lives they’ve built apart. Since they parted in college, each has married, raised a family, and made a career. When they meet again, Sarah is divorced and living outside New York, while Warren is still married and living in Boston.
Seeing Warren sparks an awakening in Sarah, who feels emotionally alive for the first time in decades. Still, she hesitates to reclaim a chance at love after her painful divorce and years of framing her life around her children and her work. Warren has no such reservations: he wants to leave his marriage but can’t predict how his wife and daughter will react. As their affair intensifies, Sarah and Warren must confront the moral responsibilities of their love for their families and each other.
Leaving charts a passage through loyalty and desire as it builds to a shattering conclusion. In her boldest and most powerful work to date, Roxana Robinson demonstrates her “trademark gifts as an intelligent, sensitive analyst of family life” (Wendy Smith, Chicago Tribune) in an engrossing exploration of the vows we make to one another, the tensile relationships between parents and their children, and what we owe to others and ourselves.
The Page 69 Test: Cost.
My Book, The Movie: Cost.
The Page 69 Test: Sparta.
My Book, The Movie: Dawson's Fall.
The Page 69 Test: Dawson's Fall.
Writers Read: Roxana Robinson (June 2019).
Q&A with Roxana Robinson.
Writers Read: Roxana Robinson.
--Marshal Zeringue
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