"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 traipses the streets of London, wrestling with the life of the recovering alcoholic. And between them, perhaps uncrossable, lies the unspoken span of their lives."--