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.

"Originally published by Atlantic Books in 2014."

"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."