Tag: NetGalley

Book Review – Our London Lives by Christine Dwyer Hickey

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About the Book

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.

Format: Paperback (512 pages) Publisher: Atlantic Books
Publication date: 5th June 2025 Genre: Literary Fiction

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My Review

Our London Lives is the story of Milly and Pip, who first meet in London in 1979 and whose lives will intersect over the next four decades.

It’s 1979 and young Milly arrives in London from Ireland, homeless, jobless and alone. During her search for work she experiences the prejudice against Irish people caused by the IRA bombing campaign. She eventually finds employment and accommodation in a pub in Clerkenwell run by Mrs. Oak. It feels like a safe haven but soon she has other challenges to face. There she meets Pip, a young boxer from a nearby club, who is already showing the signs of alcohol addiction. Although at first they barely exchange words, they’re somehow drawn to each other, perhaps because they recognise the inner pain and regrets they both harbour.

Over the years they encounter each other at various stages in their lives. They enter into a relationship but events, as well as their own weaknesses and insecurities, conspire to drive them apart. Although they each embark on other relationships, the connection between them never fades. Over the decades there are near misses, sometimes heartbreakingly close ones, and opportunities which might have brought them together again.

It’s from Milly’s point of view that we witness these events over the decades but alternating with that is Pip’s narrative set in 2017. He’s fresh out of rehab, with a set of ‘mea culpa’ letters addressed to everyone he’s ever let down – as yet unsent. Every day is a battle to remain sober and he’s lonely, very lonely. Eventually he’s forced to move in with his brother Dominic who’s always considered Pip a waster. It’s not a harmonious relationship. However, it’s a different story with Domonic’s son with whom Pip forms a bond, perhaps because he’s better able to empathise with the struggles of a young man. Woven into the story are events such as the 2017 terror attacks and the Grenfell Tower fire.

London is as much a character in the book as Milly and Pip. Through their eyes we see it change over the decades as areas fall into decay, change their character or are regenerated.

She walks through a mingle of fast-food odours: burgers and what she supposes to be Japanese curry – if she’s to believe the sign painted outside the cafe. […] The Japanese place is part of the old sewing factory – the front office, if she’s not mistaken. The building next door was the factory itself. Once it was all part of the same building, a plain brick facade with little windows upstairs that opened in warm weather, the buzz of sewing machines when you passed by, and the girls singing along to a radio. Now the walls are made of smoked glass. Creatives, is what they call the people who work in there, somebody told her.

Yet in later years it’s places in their earlier lives they feel drawn to, that give them a sense of security even though they are now rundown and abandoned. For Milly, it’s the pub owned by Mrs Oak. For Pip, it’s the boxing club. Without knowing it they are only footsteps away from each other.

Milly and Pip are both flawed characters who take wrong turns, make mistakes and poor decisions but somehow it only makes you root for them more. Milly’s story moved me intensely, particularly the betrayal she experiences and the regret she feels at decisions she made long ago. But it was Pip I really fell in love with. His character is so well drawn you feel you might recognise him if you passed him in the street.

Our London Lives is a love story spanning decades. It’s raw and gritty but full of emotional depth and tenderness. It’s about life in all its messiness. I thought the ending was perfect, leaving the reader with hope but not certainty. After all, whenever do we get that in life? I rarely reread books but this one might be the exception. It is definitely one of my books of the year.

I received a review copy courtesy of Atlantic Books via NetGalley.

In three words: Intimate, emotional, immersive

About the Author

Author Christine Dwyer Hickey

Christine Dwyer Hickey was born in Dublin and is a novelist and short story writer. Tatty, first published in 2004, was shortlisted for Irish Novel of The Year 2005 and nominated for The Orange Prize. It was listed as one of the 50 Irish Novels of the Decade. Last Train from Liguria (2009) was nominated for the Prix L’Européen de Littérature. The Cold Eye of Heaven (2011) won The Irish Novel of the Year 2012 and was nominated for the International IMPAC award.

Her novel The Narrow Land (2019) won two major prizes in 2020 – the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the inaugural Dalkey Literary Award.

Her short stories have been published in anthologies and magazines worldwide and have won several awards including twice winner of The Listowel Writers’ Competition and The Observer/Penguin Competition. She was longlisted for The Sunday Times EFG competition 2017 and her story Back to Bones was the winner of the Short Story of the Year Award at the Irish Book Awards 2017. Her play Snow Angels premiered at the Project Arts Theatre in 2014.

She has delivered lectures on James Joyce, Edward Hopper and the influence of childhood on the work of writers and has taught creative writing through workshops and master classes in various locations around the world. She is a regular contributor to radio and television shows. Her work has been widely translated into European and Arabic languages. She is an elected member of Aosdana, the Irish academy of arts.

Our London Lives (2024) was shortlisted for the Irish Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards.

Connect with Christine
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Book Review – The Matchbox Girl by Alice Jolly @BloomsburyBooks @JollyAlice

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About the Book

Adelheid Brunner does not speak. She writes and draws instead and her ambition is to own one thousand matchboxes. Her grandmother cannot make sense of this, but Adelheid will stop at nothing to achieve her dream. She makes herself invisible, hiding in cupboards with her pet rat, Franz Joseph, listening in on conversations she can’t fully comprehend.

Then she meets Dr Asperger, a man who lets children play all day and who recognises the importance of matchboxes. He invites Adelheid to come and live at the Vienna paediatric clinic, where she and other children like herself will live under observation.

But the date is 1938 and the place is Vienna – a city of political instability, a place of increasing fear and violence. When the Nazis march into the city, a new world is created and difficult choices must be made.

Why are the clinic’s children disappearing, and where do they go? Adelheid starts to suspect that some of Dr Asperger’s games are played for the highest stakes. In order to survive, she must play a game whose rules she cannot yet understand.

Format: Hardback (416 pages) Publisher: Bloomsbury
Publication date: 6th November 2025 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

Adelheid tells her story from a singular perspective and in her own unique style, complete with erratic use of capitalisation. Although looking back on events, she is determined to describe them as they happened and not with the benefit of hindsight. Of course, this is the way we all experience the world; unaware of what will happen next, only able to make decisions and adopt moral positions based on what we know now, or are told.

Adelheid is a patient in the ‘Curative Education’ department of the Vienna Children’s Hospital where children whom we would now describe as being on the autism spectrum are the subject of observation and research. Adelheid is an astute observer, both of events and of people, recording her thoughts in a series of notebooks, often with a wry humour. She is a lover of facts and of order, the latter exemplified by her obsession with collecting matchboxes and pondering how best they should be organised.

She finds herself in a chaotic world in which people try to persuade her that pretending is not the same as lying, and want her to get involved in activities she views as pointless. Ironically, in complete innocence, she initially finds some comfort in the Nazi’s promise to bring order to Austria. And, as a collector of facts, she believes what she is told.

Adelheid’s only friend is Adolf, a boy who has disdain for many of the other children on the ward, categorising them as Cabbages, Penguins (always flapping) or worse. Himself he describes as just ‘a Regular Delinquent’. He loves nothing better than creating mayhem and encourages Adelheid to join him in eavesdropping on staff meetings. Later we learn the dark secrets of his family life.

Nazi Germany continues its seemingly inexorable advance through the countries of Europe. By now Adelheid’s gift for accurately recording information has been noted and she’s given responsibility for recordkeeping. She begins to detect anomolies in patient records, noticing the unexplained transfer of children to a clinic in another hospital, Am Spiegelgrund, supposedly better able to meet their needs but in reality a place from which children never return. What Adelheid finds is a calculated, systematic programme targeting children who do not meet the Nazi ideals of racial purity, children categorised as ‘Useless Eaters’.

Through the response of the various members of hospital staff to what is happening, the book explores the question of accountability and complicity. Some, like the vile Dr. Jekelius, enthusiastically embrace Nazi ideals. Others, like Sister Viktorine and Dr. Feldner do everything they can to disrupt what’s going on, risking their own lives in the process. Even these efforts can only reduce the number of children sent to Am Spiegelgrund.

The role of Dr. Asperger (referred to in the book as ‘Dr. A’) comes under particular scrutiny. Was he knowingly complicit in what was going on? Did his desire to continue his research outweigh his moral scruples? Or did he in fact, as some of the hospital staff believe, at least prevent more children from disappearing?

Adelheid is a fictional character but many of the others in the book, including some of the children, were real people. Adelheid’s viewpoint means she is able to diverge from her own experiences now and again to give us information from a different perspective.

The Matchbox Girl depicts a dark period in European history when unimaginably evil things were done. I found some of the events in the book difficult to read about although, arguably, they should be difficult otherwise how are we to learn from them. The author has found an imaginative way of telling this story and, in Adelheid, created a memorable and captivating character.

I received a review copy courtesy of Bloomsbury via NetGalley.

Hop over to Linda’s Book Bag to read Linda’s conversation with Alice about The Matchbox Girl.

In three words: Dark, thought-provoking, quirky
Try something similar: Darkness Does Not Come At Once by Glenn Bryant

About the Author

Author Alice Jolly

Alice Jolly is a novelist and playwright. Her writing has been awarded the PEN/ Ackerley Prize, an O. Henry Prize and the V. S. Pritchett Memorial Prize, and has been longlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize. She teaches on the Creative Writing Masters at Oxford University.

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