Description

‘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.

Publisher Review

Our London Lives is huge of heart and soaring of soul — Claire Kilroy, author of SOLDIER SAILOR 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 — Colum McCann Told with a wise and benevolent heart, this is a London novel that captures the living moment of the city across decades. Christine Dwyer Hickey is a national treasure — Paul Lynch, Booker Prize-winning author of PROPHET SONG One of Ireland’s most lauded modern writers * Daily Mail * A talented and original writer * Irish Independent * I loved this book. Christine Dwyer Hickey writes such beautifully poised prose. Flawed lives played out in a postcard perfect setting — Graham Norton on THE NARROW LAND It is a long time since I have read such a fine novel or one that I have enjoyed quite so much * Irish Times on THE NARROW LAND * 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. * The Times on THE NARROW LAND *