At the turn of the millennium, then-independent publisher the Harvill Press launched its London Fiction series – a short-lived showcase of “forgotten” classics including novels by Alexander Baron, Gerald Kersh, Maureen Duffy and Henry Green. As a recent arrival in the city, I read all four books – along with Hangover Square and The Lonely Londoners – as a tour guide to the capital’s recent past: its low lives and lowborn. In her ninth novel, Our London Lives, the Irish novelist Christine Dwyer Hickey offers a similar roadmap, detailing a metropolitan experience over the course of the past five decades.
In the late autumn of 1979, teenager Milly escapes Ireland and flees to London, quickly finding work at a pub in Farringdon. There, among its fag smoke and beer fumes, she meets Pip, an Irish boxer and sometime drunk, and with him begins a halting, cautious kind of connection. It’s one that the novel traces via a twin narrative: one following Milly as she negotiates the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the new; the other more tightly chronological, centring on Pip, newly sober and attempting amends, in month-by-month dispatches from 2017.
