Excerpt from The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac by Louise Kennedy, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Gibraltar

1983
Audrey McGuigan is in front of the wire fence that marks the end of their garden, where newly planted lawn gives way to tufts of roseroot and marram grass. Behind her, Ben Bulben is under cloud, only the west side visible, curving into the sea. The tide is out, an acrid slime covering the seabed. A dog has left the carcass of a sewage-fattened mullet in the low dunes and the smell repulses her; she is seven months pregnant. Marty hasn't figured out how to use his new camera, and Audrey has been stock-still for five minutes. He's just noticed how huge she is, at least as big as when she was at full term with Rory, who is out of the picture, climbing over the Gibraltar Rocks to get away from his parents' bickering. After a clutch of car sales, Marty goes to auctions. He has bought a scrap of waste ground, a terraced house on Harmony Hill, a derelict shop near the docks. He also bought the field that borders Gibraltar. Half an hour ago, he put a sign on one of the gates that reads keep off these lands. Where is he going with his lands, Audrey wanted to know, and him reared in Belubah bloody Terrace. Their Queen Anne–style house is a bespoke pine kitchen away from finished. Rockview Lodge, they'll call it; there will be a row about that too.

1990
This one was taken by a photographer. The parish priest is between Marty and Audrey, delighted to pose with the man who gave him 5 percent off a new Mondeo and threw in alloy wheels for nothing. Audrey's mouth is smiling. Her left hand is buried in the cloud of Shona's veil to stop it from blowing away. The Communion dress is cut from Audrey's wedding gown. Shona would have preferred a dress from a shop, but her mother had been so keen to take scissors to the lace and tulle she hadn't said so. Her palms are touching, as if in prayer, a white satin handbag swinging from her wrist that's already bulging with cards and cash and Nanny Lynch's rosary beads. The more you have the more you get, Marty thinks. The day of his own Communion his father poured him a whiskey in the scullery and went out to the pub to celebrate by himself. There's a meal booked in the hotel, where he'll have to buy drinks for everyone in the bar, because that's what is expected when you own half the town and employ the other half. At least it'll give him something to do while Audrey and the children are at the long table, flanked by the Lynches. Rory is in a brown blouson jacket, his right foot raised an inch off the ground, as if he's about to bolt. Audrey would bolt too, given half a chance.

2001
Shona is wearing a one-shouldered purple dress, her long hair straightened, eyebrows thin and arched. She is smiling over at her mother while Marty takes the picture. The boy beside her is called Keith and has a blond ponytail and a bar through his eyebrow. His handshake is limp and Marty thinks Shona should think more of herself and find someone else. Not that he will say so. He and Shona aren't that close. Keith has been making a particular contribution to Shona's low self-esteem. A couple of shoves, what the counselor will later call verbal abuse, and the previous night a smack that cut through the fug of hash in her bedroom.

2011
The florist has erected a bower of pink peonies and unripe wheat and white rhododendrons at the end of the garden, on the exact spot where Marty photographed Audrey with Shona in her belly. The family are in front of it, Marty and Audrey on either side of the bride and groom, Rory and the English girl he lives with in New Zealand (South Island, as far away from Rockview as you can get) beside Audrey, yet slightly apart. Shona's hair is set in loose waves. She has just married Lorcan, an eejity fella, in Marty's opinion, but an improvement on that weasel Keith. They have been blessed with the weather. Not that it matters, because there's thirty grand's worth of a marquee with a merbau floor and chandeliers and vintage china teapots filled with cornflowers and anemones. Audrey is wearing oystercolored georgette. Her wig is a toffee shade that almost suits her, although it feels like a bathing hat she had as a child, a pink rubber abomination with flaccid flowers. Marty is preoccupied. He's not a man for speeches. He'll talk about how beautiful Shona looks. He'll say how happy he is to welcome Lorcan to the family, that he had better be good to Shona or he'll have him to answer to, and everyone will laugh. (He isn't joking on this front, as Keith with the bar in his eyebrow would attest.) The rest he'll keep to himself. That he would not have believed you could love a child that wasn't yours until Shona's arms were reaching up at him, demanding to be carried. How hard it was to give the love in the first place. How very much harder not to give it.

From THE END OF THE WORLD IS A CUL DE SAC by Louise Kennedy, published by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2023 by Louise Kennedy