We meet the two main protagonists, Milly and Pip, in 1979 in London having just arrived from their native Ireland. They came to make their fortune, unaware of each other’s existence yet, Milly works in a pub and Pip is a young boxer with great promise. We follow their lives over the next five decades as they drift in and out of each other’s orbit. Their lives are somehow destined to come together if it wasn’t for the wilfulness of Milly and Pip themselves, who keenly feel their mutual attraction but constantly repel each other. At no point is their relationship straight forward and the more we get to know them, the more we fear for them.

This is a book about missed opportunities, about lives that are full of hope and resentment at the same time and about the inevitability of broken dreams. Milly’s and Pip’s lives are not remarkable, but believable and authentic and are intrinsically linked to the ever-changing City of London. The reader experiences with and through them the Guildford Four story, the Grenfell Tower fire, the collapse of the financial markets, the gentrification of parts of London and, of course, what it meant to be Irish in 70/80/90s London.

The book is quite dark. However, although Milly’s and Pip’s story is sad, it is also tender and moving - a love story of a different kind. At the end we are left with a glimmer of hope for both of them, for which I was grateful.

I am grateful to NetGalley and Atlantic Books for an ARC in exchange for an honest review

Our London Lives by Christine Dwyer Hickey is an engaging and entertaining story of hardship and kindness of love and loss.

Milly leaves Ireland as a young woman and finds herself working in a bar in London where she meets lots of people but one person in particular Philip whom she does not really know but would like to get to know. Philip is a boxer who is dealing with his own issues whilst also trying to look out for Milly.

The story of the lives of these two characters is difficult but poignant, sometimes touching but also frustrating. They each have a network of friends and sometimes family to help them get through life's challenges.

This is such a great story that kept me fully engaged and entertained.

This novel is advertised as a searing love story, which I think is not quite right. It chronicles the lives of Pip and Milly who, for the most time, are completely separate. As such, I found it difficult to connect with, or understand, their love of one another; nor did I really understand their actions throughout the decades as we follow their highs and lows. I would have liked some more background information, especially for Milly. At times, the prose flowed and found myself getting lost in hours of reading; and elsewhere in the novel I was bored, wanting to skip long sections of irrelevant descriptions or scenes. There was also something about the writing -perhaps the insistence on referring to the main characters as he and she (as opposed to their names), which, when other characters were involved, ended up being really confusing- that irked me. I can see why some people love this novel, it’s just not for me.

A searing love letter to love and hope

In this searing novel, Dwyer Hickey asks if a romance can survive two shattered histories, while the world they once knew crumbles around them? Following Irish ex-pats Millie and Pip as they carom around 1980s London and into the late past of 2017, Our London Lives focuses in on the pair, with Millie's story running forward from her first days in London, looking for work and a home, and Pip's in 2017 after years devastated by violence and alcohol. In the intervening time, they near and part, like waves driven by forces greater than either of them, and never quite meet, and meanwhile, the world develops, worsens and changes around them, always in London, a bellwether to their tumultuous lives.

In Millie and Pip, Dwyer Hickey has created characters of such depth and breath that they fill the book on their own, even though the supporting players are just as vital and personified, even if they only appear in one scene throughout. Telling their lives but also the span of modern history in between, this is a saga of a forty year romance that might never get there, and for that potential, I am so glad I've read this book.

Four and a half stars.

I was drawn to this book because of the description and its title and it didn't disappoint. I enjoyed reading about Milly and Pip and how their paths cross only to miss each other again. The characters grow and develop and although I could feel that some bits of the book felt a bit long, I loved it very much. It brought feelings of nostalgia, of another London that seems long gone now. This is one I'll be recommending again and again!

A gorgeous, heartfelt exploration of loneliness and London, as two Irish immigrants fall in and out of love through the decades, grappling with grief, addiction, and illness as life keeps bringing them back together. Highly recommend.

This is a book that I had high hopes for, but ultimately had to DNF. I was in love with the concept of a relationship of two people, each with their own struggles, weaving in and out of each others lives. However, the density of the timelines made it difficult for me to truly get lost in the story. I hope to revisit again and give it another go!

🌃 REVIEW 🌃

Our London Lives by Christine Dwyer Hickey
Release Date: 5th September

⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

📝 - 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.

💭 - There was so much potential in the first half of this book, I loved the developing story, each of them following their separate paths. But… the second half was too long and lots of it felt unnecessary if I’m honest. While the characters were well written, they lost some of their personality in the second half I felt, and I just lost interest in the story. If it had been 150 pages shorter it could’ve had a higher rating, but I really felt I dragged myself through the end.
Unfortunately not a win for me, but not to say it won’t be for you!

Also apologies for being vaguely MIA, lots of busy work/life stuff so not had a lot of reading time and very little capacity for making fun posts!

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I loved this London novel, the city seen through the eyes of two young Irish people. Christine Dwyer Hickey shows the changes that happen to a corner of London around Farringdon, centred around the pub where Milly works and Pip is a customer. Their relationship spins them closer and apart as the years move on, and we discover them as people in a wider social landscape. The way the author holds on to, and hints at, details that she later reveals displays some really skilful storytelling. Pip and Milly, flawed and complicated, are the heart of this novel, but every other character has a reality to them, and enriches the compelling narrative. Memorable and poignant.

Loved the idea of this, but for me it didn’t deliver I’m afraid. I got half way through but it really was rather a slog - I struggled to engage with the characters and their relationships, the addiction content felt rather repetitive and a slightly watered down of material done better elsewhere, and I just didn’t get a strong sense of place and identity.

Looking at the positives, I think it’s a relatively easy read for a soap-style family epic and will be a good beach read for those in the mood.

I don’t normally review a DNF but i felt I’d got far enough to know it just didn’t gel for me.

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.

Wow, just wow. What a beautifully written book. Such intricate lives woven together over the years of recent historical events. I just didn’t want it to end it was so good. There is every emotion, failure, success and more in this novel. A candid look at real life.

Our London Lives by Christine Dwyer Hickey

The setting for this story is London 1979 where the main protagonists are two Irish teenagers who have come to London to make a better life. Milly has run away from her unkind family and finds work in a pub where she meets friends and the owner Mrs Oak who treats her like her own daughter.

Pip, a rising star in the boxing world could lose it all through his love of drink and the secret he is hiding which could show its head at any time. The friendship between these two spans over four decades coming in and out of each other's lives at different times. This book didn’t come together for me and I found it quite disjoining. The story was very balanced towards Pip and we learn so much of his past, and his relationship with his family but discover almost nothing of Millie’s. It was far too long with unnecessary and redundant paragraphs and yet there were some important revelations that I felt were told in a very detached way. The ending was so rushed and came on suddenly. It didn’t intrigue me and I thought it quite disappointing There seemed to be far too many chapters where the protagonist is walking through London reminiscing about various places and describing how the area has changed and deteriorated.

This was supposed to be a love story but it was too understated and low-key for me with zero passion. The novel is character-based however, there were no characters that made any huge impression on me and I didn’t find any of the story excited me. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a hit with me, but I know many will find this book's slow, gentle tone enjoyable. Thank you to @netgalley for an advanced reader copy of this novel.

This is one of those delicious immersive novels which saw me both reading late into the night unwilling to leave the story, and putting the book down to wait to finish it because I didn’t want it to be over. I loved the two main characters, Pip and Milly, and it was a pleasure to watch them weave in and out of each other’s lives over the course of 40 years; their stories told in alternating chapters. London is the third main character, its contrasting riches and squalor so much more than a mere backdrop as Christine Dwyer Hickey shows us buildings, architecture, gardens, riverbanks, and squats; the developers who tear down and rebuild, and the people who live, work and visit. This has everything I look for in a novel, incredible writing which draws you in and makes the fictional world real, interesting characters with depth, an insightful look at what it is to be human, and a real sense of jeopardy as these two troubled people navigate poverty, trauma, addiction and hope.

Beginning in the late 70’s Pip and Milly, two young Irish people who have moved to London, meet in a pub. Pip’s a promising boxer with a taste for drink, and Milly is a live in barmaid. There are several well rounded and fascinating characters that surround them through the years – Mrs Oak the pub owner who takes Milly in, Trish, another barmaid, Dom, Pip’s older and more successful musician brother, “… it’s not that he doesn’t love his brother, it’s just that he can’t fucking stand him.” and Dom’s son, Max. Even those on the periphery feel real, their conversations natural and distinct. I bloody adored this.

This is one of the most beautiful books I have read in a long time.
Pip and Milly are such multi-dimensional, gorgeous characters and I loved that they were a lens through which we saw London, and briefly Dublin.
Having lived in London my whole life, I learnt things about the town I'd never have imagined, and feel a newfound love for Farringdon!

I don't realy feel like I can fault this book. I usually feel overwhelmed by a book that's this long, but on this occassion, I felt that the length helped us to feel truly involved in the characters and their narratives, so that by the end I truly mourned the loss of them (and Mrs Oak).
I also thought the ending was particularly clever and really made me feel I knew the characters well enough to feel comfortable with not knowing the conclusion.

I can't wait for more people to read this book and to tell the world to read it. 5 stars.

The lives in “Our London Lives” are that of Milly and Pip. They’re both Irish but live in London in 1979. We discover more about their lives and their relationship through Milly’s story from 1979 onwards and Pip’s in 2017 as he looks back and faces up to the present.

I really enjoyed this book. The characters are vivid and even though the story jumps between the different perspectives and different years, it’s well written enough that this doesn’t feel jarring. I also loved the descriptions of London (both the older and more recent history) - it almost felt like an extra character.

I would say that the pace of the book is a little slow and I also found it difficult to understand Milly and Pip’s relationship after some of their actions, especially Pip’s. But I still felt compelled to read the book and really wanted to know how their story ended.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book.

I am finding it hard to review this book as I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it. The two characters the book centres around are Milly and Pip (Phil). The book tells the story of their lives, the good, the bad and everything in between. The supporting characters are well thought out and portrayed in a way whereby you won’t forget most of them. The story delves in depth into the relationship of Milly and Pip and their relationships with others, family and friends

The story was okay, not brilliant or spellbinding but an ok story. I felt it ended quite abruptly whereas I would have liked to know various things and how certain situations panned out.

Not a bad read but not blistering and a little slow.

This nicely puts us in London for a few decades.
With a changing economic scene, and a few historical events to add to the timeline.
Packed full to the brim of memorable and loveable characters, I was fully invested in Milly's story. Also Pip's.
Mostly Milly and Pip's story, and each bump in the road was a pleasure to read.
Marvelous stuff.

This is a beautifully told story of a love spanning over 40 years and set in London. The two main characters, Milly and Pip, are from Ireland and the tale begins in 1979. I loved this character driven read and it's authenticity of London and the social bias towards the Irish at the time. Part history, part romance and a bit of social culture added to the mix. Although the book is quite a long read, I was definitely gripped until the end, it is one which I would recommend. Thanks to Net Galley for my ARC.

A love story with the gritiness and grim reality of london life spanning decades. All at once on and off a jaded barmaid and an alcoholic boxer will they make it work through all the harshness the city throws at them only time tells.

"Our London Lives" by Christine Dwyer Hickey spans several decades, starting in 1979 when we first meet Pip and Milly. Over the decades we see what happens to them. Sometimes they are in touch, sometimes they are not. This is about enduring friendship and lives of those around them. This is a story of the ordinary man and woman but it is fascinating and you just read page after page. I'm hopeful for the ending. I'm in a glass half full kind of mood!