Other Houses

By: Paddy O'Reilly

Narrated by: Nathan Lang, Vivien Carter

Lily works as a cleaner. She moves through houses in inner-city Melbourne, unseen, scrubbing away the daily residue of other people’s privilege. Her partner Janks works the line in a local food factory. With every pay cheque, they inch further away from their former world of poverty and addiction.

Lily and Janks are determined that their daughter Jewelee will have a different life. She’ll have a career, not a dead-end job. She’ll have savings, not debt. But precarious lives are easily upended. One wrong move throws the family into a situation in which the lines between right and wrong, hope and disappointment, are blurred.

Other Houses is a masterful and tender story about people who live from payday to payday. Acutely observed and lyrical, Paddy O’Reilly’s novel paints a haunting picture of class, aspiration and the boundaries we will cross for love.

©2022 Paddy O'Reilly (P)2022 W F Howes

Critic reviews

"The tension of a thriller but the freshness and acuity of art." (Charlotte Wood)

"A bracing story of a woman tending to the households of strangers while her own runs towards catastrophe." (Josephine Rowe)