The shipyards may be disappearing and the linen mills long closed, but Ireland, and Irish novelists, are still producing stories.

Trespasses (Bloomsbury, £14.99; Tablet price £13.49) is Louise Kennedy’s debut novel, following an acclaimed short-story collection. It revolves around an affair between Cushla, a young Catholic teacher, and Michael, one of the Protestant regulars at her family’s pub outside Belfast in 1975. Billed as Sally-Rooney-in-the-Troubles, the book brings a sensitive lens to the relationships – between Cushla and her lover, her family, the children in her care – which are the real things put under stress by “sectarian tensions”. The well rehearsed story of love across the barricades provides a vessel for deeper truths about how communities treat the other, and their own.