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!

A novel of two Irish immigrants spanning forty years. It is also a love letter to an ever-changing London. Beautiful writing and atmospheric storytelling.

A good old-fashioned story of 'almost' unrequited love told in a modern way in an up-to-date setting, mainly in London.
The characterisation is excellent, the story telling is excellent, the settings are interesting.
For me this was a story of two people who loved each other so much, but dare not commit to that love because of what had happened to them previously.
The story is told generally chronologically with switching between the two characters.
This works for me better than the constant backwards/forwards switching so common in the usual modern novel.
This would be an ideal choice for a film to be made, which with the correct choice of stars to play the characters would be in my opinion a big hit.
Quite a long novel, it took me several sittings to get through, but after each set of chapters, on leaving the book, I was always looking forward to coming back to it.
Many thanks to the author for a brilliant story.
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

This is a captivating novel that does not only introduce you to two characters who will start to feel like family – Milly and Pip – but to a third character that looms even larger and will not let you go: the extraordinary, multifaceted city of London that is portrayed here over forty of its many years of existence. Just as this wonderful city constantly remakes and reinvents itself, so do Milly, who immigrates here from Ireland at the age of eighteen, and Pip, who tries to make his fortune as a boxer. That the fates of two individuals, who are so brave to take on serious inequalities such as unequal gender treatment and addiction, never quite intertwine as closely as their relationship with London, is perhaps the most poignant aspect of the novel. Other readers have commented on the novel’s overly long design (and at five hundred pages, it is indeed much longer than many other contemporary works) but the patient reader is rewarded with plenty of nuanced insights into how places, chance encounters, and near-encounters shape us as individuals. Thank you, NetGalley and the publishers, for the free ARC granted to me in anticipation of an unbiased book review.

Our London Lives is told from the alternating viewpoints of two Irish immigrants who meet in a central London pub in the 1970s. Milly is a bartender at a traditional city pub, catering for a diverse clientele covering locals, city workers, and most importantly, boxers from a neighbouring club. One of those is Pip, who we first encounter as an ex-convict who has just come out of rehab, in 2017 (the novel’s ‘present day’). Pip’s story is told entirely from the vantage point of that present day, with all the retrospective mix of nostalgia and regret that comes with that sort of angle. By contrast, Milly’s narrative unfolds chronologically, in the moment, through the years from the late 1970s through to, eventually, 2017. In her story there are large leaps and gaps that aren’t immediately filled in, but the two perspectives collide in a richly satisfying (though far from conclusive) ending. 

For both characters, aspects of their past history only emerge slowly through the novel. Both, we eventually learn, have suffered at the hands of others (outside the bounds of the book) and both experience tragedies of sorts in the course of the book itself., though interestingly they take place largely in the gaps rather than the fragments of time we experience directly with them. In Milly’s case, her greatest loss is told in a heartbreaking fashion, in an early chapter which begins by seeming innocuously comic, but ends with a reveal of a trauma from which she’ll never fully recover. 

While the personal tragedies and the will they / won’t they romance between the two central characters are the novel’s emotional heart, there’s also a lot more going on around the edges. As befits a novel with a grand historical sweep of this nature, real-world events are touched on. The thread throughout is of the decline of the version of London in which we first meet Milly, one in which communities still thrive and everyone seems to know everyone else, as developers slowly encroach, initially with a degree of optimism (alongside the evident greed) but one which is firmly shattered by the financial crisis of 2008, at which point Milly is quite literally sleeping with the enemy.
The London that Pip emerges in, of 2017, seems purposefully chosen to highlight the nadir reached by the city following those years of capital-fuelled destruction and subsequent decline. In a section that could have been crass, but is actually handled rather well, Pip finds himself experiencing near-hand the tragedy of the Grenfell fire. At the time, he’s living with his musician brother, in a swish apartment in Notting Hill. His brother has fallen on hard times (like many) and Pip busies himself monetising the property via Airbnb. Their middle class woes are very much overshadowed by the tragedy unfolding just down the road.
It’s a book of many layers. On the surface, the romance is beautifully told - largely through gaps and absences but no less powerful for it. The historical touchpoints are smartly chosen and for the most part subtly deployed in service of the books central themes, rather than crammed in for the sake of it. And underneath it all, there’s a very literary layer of allusion to Eliot’s The Waste Land, which Pip becomes obsessed with while in prison and carries with him throughout.
Overall it’s an exquisitely crafted thing. The initial immersion in the world of historic London back-street pubs had me thinking of the brilliant Patrick Hamilton from the off, but there was something about the rest of the book that (more remarkably) sustained that feeling, even as it moved between locations (away from the essential pub) and into the present day. Dwyer Hickey is a Joyce expert, and that also shines through in the best way, with the book taking the vibes of Dubliners and applying them to modern-day London in a manner I’ve not seen handled quite so effectively before. It’s an easy, compelling read, with a love story with broad appeal at its heart, but it’s also so much more than that.

A really wonderful book, one that will definitely see me reading more of the author’s work, and hopefully one that will be recognised in some of the next year’s major prizes. (9.5/10)

I was asked to review this book by NetGalley

The story is told from two characters over 40 years- both Irish living in london in the late 70s. Milly is a barmaid and Pip who is a boxer but with drink problem. Reading this London is too a character as we see the changes of London over the years.

It is dark and gritty at times, but there is a love story running through this book, it is also the kindness of strangers also.

The author writes well and this is real as you feel transported to this time.

A recommende read.

This is a book that will stay with me for a long time.
The story is told from the viewpoints of two characters, Milly and Pip, over the course of forty years. They are both Irish and live in London. When they meet, Milly is a barmaid and Pip is a promising boxer but becomes an alcoholic.
The pair live their largely separate lives against a backdrop of a London which is changing hugely, with buildings and locations crucial to the character.s deteriorating over the years.
It is a melancholy, gentle and sometimes brutal novel. If you are expecting a romance with lots of dramatic 'will they, won't they' moments to punctuate the narrative, this is not it. Pivotal events are sometimes told in a retrospective, detached way, which, as a reader, I found frustrating. The character of Pip was explored more fully than Milly's and there were times when I felt that the author held back on what motivated Milly by not delving into her backstory.
I found the novel compelling and capitivating but it felt to me like something was missing, and I did not care for the ending. For that reason, I am giving it three stars.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an advance reader copy of this novel.