Our London Lives cover art

Our London Lives

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Our London Lives

By: Christine Dwyer Hickey
Narrated by: Owen Roe, Michèle Forbes
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

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
All stars
Most relevant
A skillful writer. A book rich in love, loss and longing. I want more. Outstanding.

Outstanding.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A great story weaving through real events of the last 50 years. The characters are well developed. Very enjoyable!

So well written

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
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!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Excellent in all respects. Engrossing novel, very moving and lighthearted in places. Narration was perfect

The poignancy

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Beautifully written. I would highly recommend this book. Also excellent narration. Supremely touching. Especially for any Irish who came to London over the years.

Beautiful love story

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews