Name: Maine Irish Reads ‘Our London Lives’ by Christine Dwyer Hickey
Start: 2026-06-11T19:30:00-04:00
Location: 34 Gray St, Portland, ME, United States, Maine 04102

$Maine Irish Reads \u2018Our London Lives\u2019 by Christine Dwyer Hickey$

Maine Irish Reads, our monthly book club, meets every second Thursday here at the Center!
From 7:30 – 9 PM in the MIHC Library. Bring a friend. The more, the merrier.
About this month’s book:
‘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
1979. In the vast and often unforgiving city of London, two Irish outsiders seeking refuge find one 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.