Wow this book gave me every emotion possible. In a day where women were not equal and men treated them badly, it made me angry and i had to keep telling myself it was the past. I got emotional with the stories of loss and depression and then found joy in the strength the women had. Loved the book and the characters

As Edie walks towards to door of 73 Dove Street her life is on the brink. Everything has changed in the last 5 years and she needs to escape.

Tommie is trying to work out what her life is all about and desperately craves love.

Phyllis’ world has turned upside down and she’s burning a mattress in the street.

This is a beautiful story of the lives of three women at 73 Dove Street in London on 1958. Women who have been hurt and subjugated, but seek to find their strength.

Highly recommend, a wonderful read.

I was absolutely engrossed by this!.
I honestly couldn’t put it down, not even for a second until I’d greedily read every last page.

From the very first page the author described the sights and sounds of London in 1958 so vividly I could almost see it with my own eyes.

Edie arrives at 73, Dove Street with nothing but a tired old suitcase that’s held together by string and her old leather handbag.

From that moment on so much happens I could hardly keep up and I don’t want to spoil too much by revealing too much but let’s just say the things women have to endure are so Incredibly heartbreaking.

The author portrayed 3 different women with 3 very different problems with so much love and empathy and I think a lot of realism.

This is the first book but this author but it won’t be the last!!.

Set in the 1050s this is the story of a trio of women who are finally finding their own voice . Tommie and Edie are single women- lodgers at Phyllis's home on Dove Street. Could this finally be the place where their lives can begin again? A great reminder of the lives that women led in the 1950s - still dominated by men - their health, their work, their family. But it is the turning point for these three women - to start to live THEIR lives as they want.

A solid read.

I absolutely LOVED the author's debut, That Green Eyed Girl and I have been eagerly awaiting 73 Dove Street to see if it would capture me in the same way. This is a beautifully written novel and while engaging, it took me longer to get into it and feel invested in the characters. That is a me problem however rather than anything to do with the author's writing.

The book is set in the 1950s and focuses on three female characters living at the same address in London. The author's writing is very immersive and I found it very easy to picture their individual situations and got a real feel for how women's lives were at this time.

The characters are struggling with grief, abuse and unrequited love, although the story mainly focuses on Edie and how she came to arrive at 73 Dove Street. We do get some insight into Phyllis and Tommie's backgrounds but I would have like to have had a bit more throughout the book.

The story is very well written and the author is incredibly skilful at tying all the narrative strands together - the ending is satisfying and signifies the potential for a fresh start and new beginnings - but what these might look like for the characters is left up to the reader's imagination.

Having loved That Green Eyed Girl by Julie Owen Moylan, I entered a competition on Twitter to win a proof of her new novel 73 Dove Street and I was lucky enough to win!


Also set in the 1950s, but in London this time, 73 Dove Street follows the stories of three women who are living in the house, their lives with the men they are connected to, and the way their lives are impacted by the societal constraints thrust upon women in the 1950s.

As characters, I think I loved Tommie the most, but all three women had strengths and weaknesses that helped to provide depth to their characters. Phyllis the landlady of 73 Dove Street is an incredibly brittle character, we first meet her with a burning mattress in the street outside her house, a wayward husband who has cheated on her with one of their lodgers, and her past which has shaped her in a way she does not like.

The day that Phyllis burns the mattress, Edie Budd arrives to rent the attic room. A nervous woman with a fragility that matches the makeup-covered bruises, she is running from her past with her abusive husband Frank.

Tommie, another lodger, is such a vibrant character, working by day as a cook to a wealthy old lady, and spending her nights in Soho, searching for the man who has been her obsession for a couple of years but who never seems to reciprocate her feelings. Bubbly and vivacious, her personality is at complete odds with her willingness to keep waiting for her man to choose her. Is she also affected by her past?

Living in a patriarchal society, all of the women are constrained by the expectations of society, to accept a cheating husband, to tolerate being a victim of domestic abuse, and to patiently wait for commitment.

The novel was so evocative of the time the book was set, with chapters set in the present (1958) and five years earlier when Edie met her husband Frank, and the intervening years as we find what leads to Edie running away. I felt completely immersed into the cafe and nightclub scene in London on the cusp of the swinging sixties, with a London so vibrant, even in the fog, that it captured my heart. A world filled with showgirls and revues in Soho, together with the seedier elements of the time captured in old movies like the Ealing comedies, or more recently in movies like Wish You Were Here (1987) and Vera Drake (2004).

This captivating novel had me turning each page in anticipation as the tension gradually increased to an enthralling conclusion. It is a beautiful story of resilience in a world where the odds are stacked against women.

Set in the 1950s, this is the story of 3 very different women living at 73 Dove Street: Edie, Tommie and Phyllis and the pressures and traumas of their lives. Edie has escaped her abusive husband, Tommie has a no strings attached relationship with a man she can't help but fall for, Phyllis has a philandering husband she's thrown out. All these women's lives have been controlled and damaged by the whims of men. This is so relevant in todays society and is a stark reminder of the rights we sometimes take for granted but which could be so easily lost. At times this was tough to read, there is some lightness and hope but at its heart this is a dark, disturbing story.

The 1950s have been varyingly described as a quiet decade of relative prosperity and as the birth decade for rock ‘n’ roll, but for many urban women, poverty and discrimination persisted. This unique novel does a great job of portraying London life at the end of this decade in many facets and subtleties through its portrayal of three very different women whose main point of contact seems to be their address: the unremarkable boarding house that gives the novel its title. Whereas Phyllis, as the landlady of 73 Dove Street, tries to run a respectable house, domestic violence survivor Edie seeks refuge under her roof and audacious Tommie is pursuing a dangerous love affair.

Edie, Phyllis and Tommie are beautifully drawn and characterised, and their life stories are shared through flashbacks and present-tense accounts that pay great attention to little details. In fact, the depictions are in such a vivid manner that I sometimes forgot that instead of biographies, the three women’s life are pure fiction. Thank you to the publishers and to NetGalley for gifting me a free digital ARC of this wonderful book in return for this unbiased review.

Edie Budd arrives at a shabby West London boarding house in October 1958, carrying a broken suitcase, an envelope full of cash and hiding a terrible secret. 
And she's not the only one; the other women of 73 Dove Street have secrets of their own . . .
Tommie, lives on the second floor and works for the eccentric Mrs Vee by day. By night, she is drawn to seedy Soho nightlife - and a man she can't quit.
Phyllis, the formidable landlady, sets fire to her husband's belongings after his betrayal - her bravado hides a painful past.
At first, the three women keep to themselves.
But as Edie's past catches up with her, Tommie becomes caught in her web of lies - forcing her to make a decision that will change everything .

‘There was nobody around to disturb her, nothing except the splish splash of raindrops. Edie licked the salt from her lips and watched the rain falling.’

I found this a powerful read, it wasn’t an easy read. The subject matter is hard, Owen Moylan does not shy away from the details and this is 50’s Britain, women’s lives were not easy; at all.

These three women’s lives all collide at 73 Dove Street, their fates entwined, it is complicated, extremely emotional and vividly brought to life.
I think I took Tommie most to my heart of the three characters, she had secrets herself that become slowly revealed but she had a determination which I loved. Edie was a mixed bag for me and my perceptions of her became reframed as I read, I ended up liking her and wanted to root for her and to be able to live her own life. Phyllis, really I felt I didn’t get to know as well through the book, she was the older foil to the younger characters storyline and gave a different perspective to women’s lives in this period.

Another powerful and beautifully written book from this author, who shall continue to be one at the top of my reading lists that’s for sure!

Set in the 50’s the story opens with Edie, who is escaping her violent husband ,arriving at 73 Dove Street, a boarding house in London, with only a battered suitcase. At the boarding house also lives Tommie, who spends her nights with/obsessing over a man in Soho and Phyllis the owner who has just found her husband in bed with one of the other tenants.

The book is a real page-turner which I read late into the night! It’s a fabulous story with great characters. The authors wringing really brings the characters and settings to life. A easy 5⭐️ and a highly recommended read

What an incredible writer Julie Owen Moylan is, because within a few pages of starting her new novel I was absolutely immersed in 1950’s London. This is a London I haven’t visited too often in literature, the haunted and broken post-war period rather than the glory and the drama of the the war itself. Here the war has a ghostly presence, shown by children climbing piles of rubble or an incomplete street that looks like a mouth with one of it’s teeth missing. The story is told through three women; Edie, Tommie and Phyllis. It’s Edie we follow to 73 Dove Street where she hopes to look at a room, with just a single suitcase and an envelope full of cash. Edie is almost put off by the mattress and pile of men’s clothes burning fiercely just outside the yard, but a voice summons her from an upstairs window and she recognises a place she can lie low. What is she hiding from? Tommie lives in the room below and works for an eccentric socialite who was once wealthy and popular. Outside work Tommie is lured to the seedy nightlife of Soho and the man she can’t quit. Phyllis is the landlady of 73 Dove Street, burning her husband’s belongings in the street after she discovered a terrible betrayal. She puts on a good front, an armour that she needs to cope with a past she won’t talk about.

The author is absolutely brilliant at creating a feeling and time period, from the dark and depressing post-war London to the interiors of both No 73 and the more upmarket house where Tommie works.

“It was one of those London streets that had become a canvas of tatty boarding houses: windows filled with crooked pieces of cardboard saying ‘Room to Let’. The houses all looked the same: bay-fronted with scruffy front gardens filled with dustbins, and children loitering on doorsteps with their runny noses and scraped knees.“

She makes a beautiful observation about these streets, that where once there were hints of colour there are now bombed back to dreary black and white. People are trying to drag their lives out of wartime monochrome but fail every time. There are still houses with the front ripped off and the contents inside, like a grotesque full-size doll’s house. Through Tommie’s childhood experiences we can see what it was really like to be in one of those houses as she remembers a direct hit on her family home and being sat in the suffocating dark rubble until a hand breaks through to save her. These memories are so powerful and evocative, they really bring the reality of the Blitz to life. It’s clear that one of the reasons why London is so bleak is that it’s people are traumatised and numb. As well as the lack of money, rationing and their surroundings, these people haven’t even begun to recover. They’re vulnerable and in the case of our main characters, they’re trying to battle on alone.


I was immediately on board with Edie and loved the way the author built up her relationship with Frank. It was one of those situations where I could clearly see what was going to happen and I was mentally screaming at Edie to walk away. This is a man who knows how to choose the right woman, the one who will fall for his charms and become hooked on the way he operates. He likes to keep a woman on edge, waiting for his affection and easily moulded to what he wants by withholding that affection. Sadly it’s a pattern that’s only noticeable when you’ve been through it and Edie is a quiet, inexperienced girl who’s bowled over by his subtle manipulations. She’s so unformed and brought out such a protective mode in me. In a typical pattern he follows any glimpse of anger or violence with apologies and huge gestures.

“Frank’s pale blue eyes never left Edie’s face. Pleading with her without saying a word, desperate to make everything right between them. ‘Will you marry me, Edie? Say you will . . .’ The words tumbled out before Edie could stop and think about them. ‘Yes, of course I will.’ Her arms wrapped around his neck; her good wrist covering the bruises on the other one. His mouth felt tender and warm on hers and for that moment she couldn’t hear the daft comments or applause from the pub, it was just her and Frank”.

The abuse Edie suffers is a hard read, but such an authentic representation of domestic violence in all it’s forms. I am from a working class family, with some very strong women in both my grandmother’s generation and those aunties who were old enough to get married during the war. They often comment on how the generations beneath theirs are too quick to split up or divorce and that marriages in their generation tended to stay together. Yet, when I hear the reality of some of their marriages - the drinking, gambling, physical and sexual violence, financial abuse and infidelity - I wonder what’s the point of a long marriage that has only left them grieving and traumatised? The author shows how economic and psychological difficulties prevented women from leaving terrible relationships. I was interested to read the author’s comments about her own family and how the strong women in it had given her inspiration for the book.

I haven’t spoken about Phyllis much, although towards the end of the book it was her experience that had tears pouring my down my face. At the beginning of the book we see the burning pile of men’s clothes outside No 73 and we could guess at what had happened in her marriage. She’s full of anger at her husband, but as the story develops we get the feeling there is something underlying her feeling of being wronged. We get the picture of a marriage rather like the bombed out houses - a facade remains but it’s been empty for some time. When we hear the full story it is so emotional, I found it deeply moving. It isn’t just the bombed houses that are missing. There are people locked in wartime, trying to carry on by avoidance, distraction or stepping around something there’s only one way through. I found this part of the book so beautifully rendered and deeply felt. Julie has dedicated this book to her grandmother and in her afterword she mentions the strong, working class women in her family. She has really done them proud with this wonderful novel.

Thoroughly enjoyed reading 73 Dove Street which is a shabby boarding house in London.
The story centres around three women each living with their own heartbreak with lives they feel dissatisfied with.
Phyllis is the landlady of the boarding house & is suffering the heartbreaking betrayal of her husband whom she has thrown out.
She puts on a brave face as she struggles with the aftermath of that & the past that she won’t talk about.
Tommie is her tenant & works for an eccentric posh lady called Mrs Vee.
She has a habit of seeking out the seedier night life of Soho & a man that she keeps chasing after.
Edie is the new tenant & has just arrived but is worrying if she has done the right thing by coming here.
The secret’s she holds are all consuming & she is in turmoil.
Her back story flows through the whole of the book.
Descriptive & emotional at times this well written story brings back what it was like for a woman living in the fifties.
Men were very dominant & if you looked at them or said anything that didn’t suit you could be in fear of a beating.
Life was hard in post war London & many women felt the brunt of being always controlled by their men.
Captivating interesting read.

Three remarkable women’s lives collide at 73 Dove Street boarding house.
Initially the women keep to themselves, but as Edie’s past catches up with her, why has she so much cash in her cardboard suitcase.
That age old adage of women supporting each other comes into play, finding hope in the hardest of circumstances.
Loved the 1950’s setting, the chippy teas, pub on every corner and the musty pink eiderdowns.
But was also annoyed with the little choices left for women in this era, ultimately the husband had the last word.
Beautifully and powerfully written.
Thank you @julieowenmoylan, @michaeljbooks & @netgalley for the eARC

I loved this book. For me, it was all about the characters - authentic working class women fighting very real battles. Why don’t we see these women in high-class fiction more often? The setting of post-war London was brilliantly realised from the very first lines. I shall be going back to read the writer’s previous book and awaiting her next.

Such a great read!

Back in the fifties, when boarding houses with fearsome landladies were much more common, Edie Budd is making for 73 Dove Street. Puzzled at the many items ablaze on the pavement outside that very address, she clutches her suitcase and meets Phyllis, landlady, who shows her to her attic room. Tommie is just moving from that small room to a larger one below, recently vacated. Once alone, Edie looks for a safe place to hide an envelope, bulging with cash; as it turns out, she's not the only one with secrets.

Beautifully written, this is an exciting tale with the layers being peeled back slowly as we both advance in time and find out such a lot in retrospect. Easy to follow, I was quickly engrossed and - I must admit - full of curiosity as to how Edie came to have so much cash! Such an enigmatic tale, well told, deserves my recommendation and all five glowing stars. Definitely an author I shall be looking out for in future!

My thanks to the publisher for my copy via NetGalley; this is - as always - my honest, original and unbiased review.

I thought I couldn’t be more of a fan of Julie Owen Moylan than I already was, having absolutely loved That Green Eyed Girl when I read it last year. But I was wrong - Moylan is such an incredible storyteller, with an ability to bring both the setting and her characters to life with an intensity that ensures as a reader you are fully transported, immersed in this case in 1950s London and the moving story of three women that will grab you by the throat and keep you invested in their lives until the very last page.

Three very different women are united by one address - 73 Dove Street. Phyllis is the landlady, Edie and Tommie are residents. What unites them is that they have all suffered at the hands of men - Phyllis has recently thrown out her cheating husband and is struggling to adjust to life on her own, Tommie is in love with an unnamed man who clearly doesn’t love her back and is simply using her, and Edie is running away from something. The book takes us back five years as we learn more about Edie’s life and how she has ended up at 73 Dove Street, and how her life becomes intertwined with the other two women.

It isn’t always an easy read - as an exploration of the challenges faced by working-class women after the war, it doesn’t shy away from some difficult topics and I defy anyone not to feel anger about what they have to contend with, but ultimately there is a message of hope, a celebration of the strength of women determined to change their story and the power of female friendship.

This book was set in the 1950s and centres around three female characters living in a boarding house in London. It was very atmospheric, but that atmosphere felt oppressive and uncomfortable (which was presumably the intended effect). I found it to be well written and it had a good plot interweaving the three women's stories to great effect.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and the publisher for a free advance copy of 73 Dove Street in exchange for an honest review.

An engaging tale of the intersecting lives of three women at a bording house in 1950s Soho.

Swipe for the full synopsis!

I got swept away by Moylan’s debut, That Green Eyed Girl and was eager for 73 Dove Street to do the same. What I found was a beautifully engaging novel that took me a bit longer to feel invested in, but this slow burn drama was worth the effort.

I found Moylan’s writing to be immersive and bursting with the smallest of details, bringing to life 1950s London and the reality of women at this time. Trapped by abuse, unrequited love or grief, the three women at the heart of 73 Dove Street represent a generation of women who were restricted by society, with few rights on their side.

The narrative jumps in time between 1958, where Edie arrives at 73 Dove Street, and four years earlier when she meets future husband Frank. Readers are teased with details on how Edie came to be at Dove Street. Nervous and quiet, Edie intrigues fellow border Tommie, a fiesty party girl familiar with nights on the town in shadier areas of Soho with her own baggage to be revealed. Landlady Phyllis has her own problems, mainly a cheating husband, yet her strong front hides a shocking vulnerability…

Moylan weaves her narrative with skill and flair, bringing together all strands together into a gripping yet satisfying finale.

Ultimately, this is a story of escape, of hope and of new beginnings.

Wow, wow, wow! What a page turner and what an emotional read. Julie has captured the essence of post war London perfectly and she whisks her reader straight back there with her brilliant descriptions of the city by day and night, the music, the food, the drink. The three women who find themselves at 73 Dove Street each have their own story and yet they share much in common: each at the whim of a society where women really had very little freedom or rights and men, especially the husbands, controlled their lives. Yet in Edie, Tommie and Phyllis we meet three incredible courageous women who find their inner strength and courage and are able to write their own stories in the end. My heart broke for them so many times reading this book. A truly amazing story.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an arc in exchange for a review.

As usual in my reviews, I will not rehash the plot, or the publisher's blurb.

** Trigger warnings ** : The book includes scenes of domestic violence, backstreet abortion, attempted suicide, loneliness.

This was a bit of a "mixed bag" for me. It was well written, and the plot was well researched, but I didn't actually like the three main women characters unfortunately.

Their lives - which may well reflect the reality for women during the 1950s - seemed rather wretched, albeit in different ways (see trigger warnings!). I couldn't understand their acceptance of the way they were treated, particularly when they all had skills, each in their own way.

I didn't find the story uplifting and it made me feel rather downcast for the rest of the day after I'd finished reading it. I suppose that is part of the point of reading about topics such as domestic violence etc - to make you sit up, take notice and see what you could possibly do to change things.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for an ARC. All opinions my own.