'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.

"[This] irresistible new book has [...] heart and range...reminiscent of Claire Keegan or Douglas Stuart, filled with a warmth that sweetens the pain" - The Times

"[An] epic portrait of two complicated people...a masterful work full of skilful nuance and profound truth" - Irish Times

"Captures brilliantly the creeping impact of gentrification and the experience of those who fall through the cracks during society's so-called progress...there are plenty of tender moments and a whole cast of characters for whom we care deeply, offering an affecting portrait of the Irish diaspora experience" - Guardian

"Remarkable...moving, profound and honest. There are many excellent Irish-in-London novels, yet for me, Milly and Pip's story stood out as unique and special" - Irish Independent

"Epic yet intimate...a novel full of heart and humanity" - The Skinny

"An impeccable character study that lays bare the true nature of love and connection in a landscape haunted with old ghosts" - Belfast Telegraph

"[An] emotionally engaging story of two people bound by unspoken trauma and of a city in a state of flux" - Observer

"One of Ireland's most lauded modern writers" - Daily Mail

"A talented and original writer" - Irish Independent

"It is a long time since I have read such a fine novel or one that I have enjoyed quite so much" - Irish Times on THE NARROW LAND

"Christine Dwyer Hickey's breathtakingly beautiful novel The Narrow Land is about the marriage of Edward Hopper and his wife, Josephine, but builds into a meditation on all marriages and on creativity, in sentences that have the poise and beauty of a great picture." - The Times on THE NARROW LAND