Book Launch: “OUR LONDON LIVES” by Christina Dwyer Hickey

Book Launch: “OUR LONDON LIVES” by Christina Dwyer Hickey

In conversation with Journalist Dorothy Allen

The ICC is delighted to present the UK Book Launch of the award-winning author Christina Dwyer Hickey’s new book OUR LONDON LIVES.  

Published by Atlantic Books, ‘Our London Lives is already being praised throughout the literary world..

Colum McCann, author of ‘Apeirogon’ says.. ‘Our London Lives is a profound love story that doesn’t shirk from the fact that all love stories contain just as much darkness as they do light. Like Barbara Kingsolver, Hickey captures the pulse of the living moment.  A superb book by one of Ireland’s finest and most honest writers.’ 

Claire Kilroy, author of ‘Soldier, Sailor’ says… ‘Our London Lives is huge of heart and soaring of soul.’

Booker Prize Winner, Paul Lynch, author of “Prophet Song’ says … ‘Told with a wise and benign heart, this is a London novel that captures the living moment of the city across decades. Christine Dwyer Hickey is a national treasure.’

Thu 26 September 2024

Doors: 7.00pm; Starts: 7.30pm

Tickets: £5

 Our London Lives: 

It’s 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.

About Christine Dwyer Hickey

Christine Dwyer Hickey was born in Dublin and is a novelist and short story writer. Her 2019 novel The Narrow Land won two major prizes: the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the inaugural Dalkey Literary Award. 2020 saw her 2004 novel Tatty chosen for UNESCO’s Dublin One City One Book promotion. Her work has been widely translated into European and Arabic languages. She is an elected member of Aosdana, (the distinguished group of artists whose work has been deemed by the Government of Ireland, to have made an outstanding contribution to the creative arts in Ireland).

Christina will be in Conversation with Journalist Dorothy Allen.

About Dorothy Allen:

Dorothy is an award-winning journalist, currently the London correspondent of Swiss magazine Tierwelt. She is a former BBC reporter, working in documentary programmes for television (Brass Tacks; Panorama) and radio (File on Four). As a print journalist, she won a Feature Writer of the Year award while reporting for the Burton Daily Mail. She has also written a weekly television review column for The Tablet magazine. Dorothy is a former Vice Chair of the Irish Literary Society. Dorothy is also a key member of the ICC Irish Literature Programming team.

Christina Dwyer Hickey will do a Book Signing following this event.

Praise for Author Christine Dwyer Hickey

‘One of Ireland’s most lauded modern writers’ – Daily Mail

‘A talented and original writer’ – Irish Independent

‘I loved this book. Christine Dwyer Hickey writes such beautifully poised prose. Flawed lives played out in a postcard perfect setting’  – Graham Norton on The Narrow Land

‘It is a long time since I have read such a fine novel or one that I have enjoyed quite so much’  – Irish Times on The Narrow Land

‘Christine Dwyer Hickey’s breathtakingly beautiful novel The Narrow Land is about the marriage of Edward Hopper and his wife, Josephine, but builds into a meditation on all marriages and on creativity, in sentences that have the poise and beauty of a great picture.’ – The Times on The Narrow Land

‘Reaches into the heart of the creative impulse itself… a masterpiece’ – The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2020 judges

Our London Lives will be published by Atlantic Books on 05 September 2024; Hardback (£18.99) & eBook