British Book Awards Fiction: Debut

The British Book Awards 2021, or Nibbies, represent the best of the book trade - the UK’s leading creative industry. First launched in 1990 and now run by The Bookseller, the British Book Awards and its sister awards schemes – The British Book Award for Export and Library of the Year – showcase and celebrate the best books, the best bookshops and the best publishers. The Nibbies are unique in recognising that a book’s success is not down to just one factor. It is the author’s creative genius, it is the publisher’s skill and support and it is the bookshop’s championing. The Nibbies’ Books of the Year are unapologetically about success but not ‘just’ who is top of the bestseller lists. We want to find the best independent bookshops from rural Scotland to inner-city London. We celebrate the small presses that are such a vital part of the publishing ecosystem. We champion the best illustrators.

WINNER 2023

Trespasses

Kennedy, Louise ISBN: 9781526623362
Paperback / softback

Add to Basket

One by one, she undid each event, each decision, each choice. If Davy had remembered to put on a coat. If Seamie McGeown had not found himself alone on a dark street. If Michael Agnew had not walked through the door of the pub on a quiet night in February in his white shirt. There is nothing special about the day Cushla meets Michael, a married man from Belfast, in the pub owned by her family. But here, love is never far from violence, and this encounter will change both of their lives forever. As people get up each morning and go to work, school, church or the pub, the daily news rolls in of another car bomb exploded, another man beaten, killed or left for dead. In the class Cushla teaches, the vocabulary of seven-year-old children now includes phrases like 'petrol bomb' and 'rubber bullets'. And as she is forced to tread lines she never thought she would cross, tensions in the town are escalating, threatening to destroy all she is working to hold together. Tender and shocking, Trespasses is an unforgettable debut of people trying to live ordinary lives in extraordinary times.

- Browns Books Synopsis