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Our London Lives

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Our London Lives

By: Christine Dwyer Hickey
Narrated by: Owen Roe, Michèle Forbes
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About this listen

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.

©2024 Christine Dwyer Hickey (P)2024 W. F. Howes Ltd City Life Friendship Genre Fiction Urban World Literature England City
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A skillful writer. A book rich in love, loss and longing. I want more. Outstanding.

Outstanding.

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I saw this in the library, having never heard of the author. it was such a beautiful story, I loved the characters, her style. best book for a long time

I loved this.. from page 1 I was invested

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This is a wonderful 40 year span of two lives. Created in alternating narratives of astonishing reality, musicality and tenderness , are the two struggling human beings Milly and Philip. Milly had come from Ireland as an eighteen year-old and found work in Mrs Oak’s pub in London . Within her first year she has given birth to, and had taken away from her, baby Flora who remains viscerally within her throughout the decades. She has also fallen in love with Philip, the hard-drinking local whose long and troubled life as a recovering alcoholic over the years meshes in and out with Milly’s own

The Irish writer Christine Dwyer Hickey is the author of a host of award winning novels but her latest Our London Life is the first I have listened to. Throughout, the writing is beautifully composed and the insight and detail piercingly acute. I loved it.

Various themes play through Milly and Philip’s narratives. Vividly presented is the metamorphosis of London and London life over the four decades, studded with graphic real life events such as the Grenfell fire and expressions of anti Irish hostility. There is the experience of Milly as the displaced Irish girl in an alien city, and the impact of the agonies of Philip’s sympathetically presented struggle to overcome his alcohol addiction .

Above all, the author’s empathy and insight is for human beings, male, female, young and old. She reveals their relationships and inner lives with all their strivings, struggles and sufferings, and perhaps above all, their hard-earned resilience to fortune’s various ‘slings and arrows’.

These themes are evident too in the snatches of T.S.Eliot’s Waste Land threaded through the whole novel, half-remembered lines inside Philip’s head. Eliot’s line “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” resonates particularly strongly with Milly. It is the fragments of her lived life which make Milly the self-reliant woman she becomes.

The two narrators are first class, presenting a variety of accents and being completely in tune with the delicate nuances of the writing. I think hearing Milly’s Irish voice, and the London voices, makes them even more real than reading her words on the page.



Wonderful!

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Excellent in all respects. Engrossing novel, very moving and lighthearted in places. Narration was perfect

The poignancy

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Loved the main Irish character voices but female English accents sounded like characters from Good night sweetheart. And male accents especially Max were grating. The less said about the Welsh AA support character accent, the better. Haha . I know the area around Farringdon and enjoyed imagining the happenings when walking down Cowcross street. I am guessing pub was based on The Castle.

Performance

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I was sorry that I listened to this book rather than read it. The book was read by a man and a woman who tried, VERY badly and VERY unsuccessfully, to adopt a range of English accents for various characters that resulted in grating and completely destroyed what might otherwise have been a good listen.

Awful accents!

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