Our London Lives

'Sprawling yet intimate' Guardian

'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

'A London novel that captures the living moment of the city across decades' PAUL LYNCH





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.



[This] irresistible new book has [...] heart and range...reminiscent of Claire Keegan or Douglas Stuart, filled with a warmth that sweetens the pain



[An] epic portrait of two complicated people...a masterful work full of skilful nuance and profound truth



Captures brilliantly the creeping impact of gentrification and the experience of those who fall through the cracks during society's so-called progress...there are plenty of tender moments and a whole cast of characters for whom we care deeply, offering an affecting portrait of the Irish diaspora experience



Remarkable...moving, profound and honest. There are many excellent Irish-in-London novels, yet for me, Milly and Pip's story stood out as unique and special



Epic yet intimate...a novel full of heart and humanity



An impeccable character study that lays bare the true nature of love and connection in a landscape haunted with old ghosts



[An] emotionally engaging story of two people bound by unspoken trauma and of a city in a state of flux



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.