'Sprawling yet intimate' Guardian 'Huge of heart and soaring of soul' CLAIRE KILROY 'A
profound love story...Like Barbara Kingsolver Hickey captures the pulse of the living moment'
COLUM McCANN 'A London novel that captures the living moment of the city across decades' PAUL
LYNCH 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.
