Atlantic snaps up 'irresistible' new book by Walter Scott Prize-winner Hickey

Atlantic Books has snapped up Our London Lives by Walter Scott Prize-winner Christine Dwyer Hickey.

Group associate publisher Clare Drysdale bought world English language rights from Faith O’Grady at Lisa Richards. Our London Lives will be published in royal hardback, export trade paperback and e-book on 5th September 2024.

The synopsis says: "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 […] 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."

Hickey is a novelist and short story writer whose most recent novel, The Narrow Land (Atlantic), won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the inaugural Dalkey Literary Award. She said: "The novel is a love story of sorts, following the lives of two misfits over a period of 40 years. And it’s a meditation on the city of London over the same period. It looks at many things: isolation, alcoholism and the peculiarities of the human heart."

Drysdale added: "This magnificent story feels like the book Christine Dwyer Hickey was born to write. I read it with my whole heart, profoundly moved as I followed Christine’s beautifully-formed characters through decades and changes of fortune […] Ultimately this wondrous book is its very own thing, a gripping love story expressed in gorgeous language."