Award-winning Christine Dwyer Hickey ‘magnificent’ new novel Our London Lives to be published by Atlantic

Clare Drysdale, group associate publisher of Atlantic Books, has bought World English language rights to Christine Dwyer Hickey’s Our London Lives from Faith O’Grady at Lisa Richards. Our London Lives will be published in royal hardback, export trade paperback and ebook on September 5^th 2024.

Christine Dwyer Hickey was born in Dublin and is a novelist and short story writer. Her most 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.

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 says,

‘When I was young, I worked one summer as a barmaid in London. From behind the bar, I watched the melting pot of London life – so different to the Dublin where I was reared. Over the years, I have often gone back. I have watched London change shape and have noted the psychological effect it has on its people. There are two main characters with Irish roots in this novel, Milly, a poor Irish Protestant who becomes a barmaid, and Pip, a boxer who has an English father. They are not part of the Irish community in London, nor do they ever really fit into their London lives. Yet London enables them to be who they are – invisible and, at the same time, part of something. The novel is a love story of sorts, following the lives of two misfits over a period of forty years. And it’s a meditation on the city of London over the same period. It looks at many things: isolation, alcoholism and the peculiarities of the human heart.’

Clare Drysdale, group associate publisher of Atlantic Books, says,

‘This magnificent, epic, irresistible story feels like the book Christine Dwyer Hickey was born to write. I read it with my whole heart, profoundly moved as I followed Christine’s beautifully-formed characters through decades and changes of fortune. Anyone who fell for Trespasses or Normal People or One Day will want to surrender to Our London Lives immediately, but ultimately this wondrous book is its very own thing, a gripping love story expressed in gorgeous language.’