by Christine Dwyer Hickey
Publication Date: 05/18/2018
ISBN: 9781628972566
After more than thirty years in New York City, Elaine Nichols returns home to Ireland to her invalid father and his geriatric Alsatian dog. As a pregnant teenager she was sent away to avoid scandal and possible legal consequences. Shuttling back and forth between two time zones—the 1970s and the present—and set in a Cheever-esque suburb of sadness and shame, The Lives of Women deals with the savagery of respectability, betrayal, and the desperation that ensues when a sixteen-year-old girl gets pregnant and feels she has no one to help her, apart from her friends. Hickey (The Cold Eye of Heaven, Last Train from Liguria) shows herself to be a storyteller of rare ability and a stylist of clarifying beauty.
"Christine Dwyer Hickey's writing is both flowing and elegant."
"Christine Dwyer Hickey's The Lives of Women mines the chasm between adults and teenagers, and exposes the narcissism and cruelty that lie behind the respectable front of suburban life."
"Dwyer Hickey has done a fantastic job of honing in on that dangerous, delicate time between adolescence and adulthood. The terrifying truth in her novel is that it can all go so wrong so quickly when teenage emotions are left to run unchecked. A well-written and engaging novel."
"The book’s genre is hard to pin down. It is cast in two periods more than 30 years apart, and reads like a closely observed novel of manners – then and now. But since ...the sinister is never far from the surface of her prose, The Lives of Women reads at times like a suburban gothic and at others could be mistaken for a straight-up murder mystery."
CHRISTINE DWYER HICKEY has twice won the Listowel Writers’ Week short story competition and is a prize winner in the Observer/Penguin short story competition. Her bestselling novel, Tatty, was longlisted for the Orange Prize. She lives in Dublin.