Our London Lives

'Huge of heart and soaring of soul' CLAIRE KILROY

'A profound love story...Like Barbara Kingsolver, Hickey captures the pulse of the living moment' COLUM McCANN



1979. In the vast and often unforgiving city of London, two Irish outsiders seeking refuge find one another: Milly, a teenage runaway, and Pip, a young boxer full of anger and potential who is beginning to drink it all away.



Over the decades their lives follow different paths, interweaving from time to time, often in one another's sight, always on one another's mind, yet rarely together.



Forty years on, Milly is clinging onto the only home she's ever really known while Pip, haunted by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, traipses the streets of London and wrestles with the life of the recovering alcoholic. And between them, perhaps uncrossable, lies the unspoken span of their lives.



Dark and brave, this epic novel offers a rich and moving portrait of an ever-changing city, and a profound inquiry into character, loneliness and the nature of love.



Christine Dwyer Hickey was born in Dublin and is a novelist and short story writer. Her recent novel The Narrow Land won two major prizes: the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the inaugural Dalkey Literary Award. 2020 also saw her 2004 novel Tatty chosen for UNESCO's Dublin One City One Book promotion. Her work has been widely translated into European and Arabic languages. She is an elected member of Aosdana, the Irish academy of arts.



Our London Lives is huge of heart and soaring of soul



Our London Lives is a profound love story that doesn't shirk from the fact that all love stories contain just as much darkness as they do light. Like Barbara Kingsolver, Hickey captures the pulse of the living moment. A superb book by one of Ireland's finest and most honest writers



Told with a wise and benevolentheart, this is a London novel that captures the living moment of the city across decades. Christine Dwyer Hickey is a national treasure



One of Ireland's most lauded modern writers



A talented and original writer



I loved this book. Christine Dwyer Hickey writes such beautifully poised prose. Flawed lives played out in a postcard perfect setting



It is a long time since I have read such a fine novel or one that I have enjoyed quite so much



Christine Dwyer Hickey's breathtakingly beautiful novel The Narrow Land is about the marriage of Edward Hopper and his wife, Josephine, but builds into a meditation on all marriages and on creativity, in sentences that have the poise and beauty of a great picture.