Other Houses

by Paddy O’Reilly

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 check 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.

Genres: Fiction, Australia, Contemporary

244 pages, Hardcover

Published March 1, 2022

Reviews

[Vick Collins · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t recall reading anything that so perfectly describes the juggle, the real life affliction of living pay day to pay day. While Lily was juggling one or two balls more than some of us, we all know her, I am her, she is my friends and the ladies in my street. This is exactly the type of fiction I want to spend my hard earned on. Thank you Paddy, this is grass root fiction, a modern day Monkey Grip.

[Jaclyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was delighted to see @affirmpress published Paddy O’Reilly’s new novel in hardcover. Australian fiction is so rarely published in hardcover that it always feels like a joyous celebration when it is. And this is a book worth celebrating. Seeing how precarious life is, and how impossible choices are, for the working poor is uncommon in Australian lit fiction. Characters who are cleaners and factory workers are equally rare. What O’Reilly has done here, with real tenderness and heart, is show how truly hard it is to break cycles of poverty and addiction. Her characters in Lily and Janks are fully formed. She uses a crime heist to add pace to what is otherwise the story of a family on the brink. My favourite sections were the insights and quips cleaners Lily and Shannon share. Gosh our lives are messy. And when you have no safety net life is lived on the exhausting edge

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed. Loved having characters that are cleaners and factory workers and in Melbourne. Plot didn’t really vibe with me but enjoyed

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paddy O'Reilly is the author of three unforgettable social novels: The Factory (2005); The Fine Colour of Rust (2012); and The Wonders (2014).  Her new novel Other Houses features a couple living payday to payday as they try to transition from a life of poverty and addiction.  Like Eliot Perlman's Three Dollars (1998) which—when we had no idea how bad it would get—depicted the vulnerability of people in the globalised economy, Paddy O'Reilly's novel shows how precarious life is for the working poor in the 21st century. Other Houses is the story of Lily and Janks, and Lily's obnoxious daughter Jewelee, an entitled teenager who is the catalyst for their loss of control over their situation.

When Lily meets Janks, she's a cashier at a supermarket and he's an addict.  With a combination of wavering determination and luck, Janks gets a scarce place in rehab. When he's clean the couple make a fresh start.  They move away from temptation from his 'mates', and he gets a dull job in a factory while she does cleaning because the flexible hours mean she can be home for Jewel.  They live from payday to payday, just scraping by but determined that Jewel will have a different sort of life.  They don't want her to be one of the working poor.  They want her to have a career, and savings instead of debt.

Other Houses is a gritty novel about serious issues, but it's often playful. O'Reilly has fun depicting the kinds of houses that Lily and her friend Shannon clean, showing the financial and social gulf between those who are cleaners and those who can afford them.

Number 63 is a two-storey terrace, renovated, with four bedrooms, three bathrooms, a formal lounge, large living area combined with kitchen and dining, and a laundry and sun porch leading to the garden.

We hate this house because of chrome.  Chrome and leather furniture, chrome handrails on the stairs, chrome kitchen stools, chrome and glass coffee table, side table, nest of occasional tables.  Two small children whose splayed sticky handprints can be found even on the underside of the chrome frames of the chairs.  Some tiny handprints are identifiably oatmeal, some butter, some we suspect are dried poo.  The metal isn't properly finished and every fortnight I half-expect to find blood from a sliced finger.  Shannon calls it the House of Hands.  The lady of the House of Hands leaves us two mugs, two teabags and four Aldi shortbread biscuits on her toddler-handprinted kitchen counter like a present for Santa.  It seems she is saying relax, I don't think of you as my employees, but every few months she sends an email to Hector, our boss, querying the amount of time we take to clean her property.  (p.26)

They also clean the Horror House, the House of Doom, Lady Accountant, the Webber (with spiders), the Special Occasion House and the Portaloo.

The family is on the margins and the rent is a struggle, but now they live in gentrified Northcote. So when Jewelee, who is surely the nastiest teenager ever depicted in fiction, has a school trip to Greece, it triggers a desperate quest for the money to pay for it.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/04/03/o...

[Neale · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Stars!!!

My review is published in the May edition of goodREADING magazine.

[Gavan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderfully written & interesting story. Investigates themes of class, poverty, drugs, & many of Melbourne's obsessions like property, schooling & suburbs. Certainly a page turner. My only quibble is that I felt the ending was differently paced- whereas the rest of the book took us through a few days in great detail (which I loved), the end ran through a few weeks in a few pages.

[Lewis Woolston · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not having a good run with modern Australian literary fiction lately. Every book i see in the library and think "i'll give it a go" turns out to be pretty unsatisfying.
This was sort of ok. It had moments of real promise early on and the portrayal of working class life felt authentic but by the time i got two thirds of the way through it i was just not interested or engaged with it.

[Ali · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the sections of this which featured the daily banter, support and silent solidarity between main character Lily and her cleaning partner-best friend Shannon. I would happily have read an entire book centered around this: O'Reilly gets so right not only the desperate unfairness and stress of poverty, the inevitable downward cycle of it, but she captures the solidarity and love that so many working class women feel for their coworkers, relationships forged out of shared miseries and the ways in which those can feel like the only bonds preventing you from drifting away on the winds. The particular layering of sexism, mothering, mothering-in-sexism, poverty line wages can only be countered with a steady stream of wisecracks, supplemented by shared eye rolling and hugs. O'Reilly also perfectly captures the way so many minimum wage women still invest, often despite themselves, emotional energy in their clients and employers. It is a startingly portrait, and not entirely a depressing one.
However, the rest of the book didn't really work together for me. It felt a little like two different narratives stiched together, with its weakest at the intersection points. The depth of realism in Lily's storyline did not feel as if it carried through to Janks - whose storyline increasingly baffled me. And while I accept that teenagers are in fact confusing, here Lily's daughter's swings seemed more aligned with plot needs than characterisation.
If I'm whinging I'll add my pet hate at the moment is storylines where individuals with a long history of constant opioid use do a single residential treatment and get clean. It's a unicorn (general relapse rates for abstinence inpatient programs are around 80% in 6 months and the 20% are those with shorter and more sporadic histories as a rule). So many people pour their energies and money into these programs, because in books and TV, they always work. Grr)
But a prequel with a Lily and Shannon meet-cute I'd be totally up for.

[Lauredhel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is what I wanted books like Boy Swallows Universe to be. "Gritty" real Australian fiction from a woman's point of view. The MC is a woman with a teenage daughter; her husband is an ex addict. MC and he met when she was a supermarket cashier; he got clean and together they struggled their way to a different environment - the worst house on the best street - to try to get their daughter away from her 'bad influences'. MC now cleans the houses of the well-off (and describes this in, well, not "loving" detail, but detail), while he has been dragged back into a dangerous situation due to debt.

Other Houses really hammers home the reality of poverty and the near impossibility of working your way out of it.

And yeah, they don't all always make good decisions, but who does?

[Erin]

DNF. I liked the main story but I felt it was bogged down by the Janks storyline.

[Celina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lily and Janks, formerly a single mother and an addict, have worked hard to give their daughter Jewelee a better life. But will honest work, Lily’s as a cleaner (these scenes are some of the best) and Janks’s at a food processing plant, be enough? This Australian novel is hard to find, but worth it. 4.5 stars.

[Alycia · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.75🌟🌟✨

[Trisha · Rating 4 out of 5]

The heartache and anguish I felt for the plight of these characters. The admiration and respect. The crushing weight of their circumstances.

I loved this book. It was a combination of joyous and surprisingly beautiful language, crafted so deftly, so delicately; and raw, gritty, everyday life for the battlers, the triers, the almost succeeders. The hopeful, hopeless.

Without spoilers, I can only say that I was left wanting. Wanting something different. Wanting life to be good. I guess it was, in one sense.

Despite this, I think this book deserves a hearty round of applause (and the author, of course). 4.5⭐️

[Maurice Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed how local it was. The ending was great!

[Mia · Rating 4 out of 5]

“We left our old life behind and faked our new life until we were absorbed into it.”

Other Houses, essentially, is an insightful look at the mundane and arduous lives of those in working-class Australia. It explores differences between socio-economic classes in terms of their priorities and lifestyles in an often humorous way. Jealousy mixes with cynicism, and pride contrasts with despondency. Paddy O’Reilly balances profound insights into working-class life with witty humour effortlessly.

The story is written in first person from the alternating perspectives of both Lily and Janks, mum and stepdad to fifteen-year-old Jewelee. Four years before the stories events, they lived in a poorer suburb of Melbourne and realised that they wanted to provide a better life for Jewelee, so they moved to a more upper-class area—where they can barely afford the rent and don’t fit in with their neighbourhood. Lily works as a cleaner in some of the wealthiest parts of central Melbourne, and Janks, who has suddenly disappeared, has become caught up in a drug-dealing heist. Lily doesn’t know this though—only the reader—which at times creates dramatic irony. These two characters don’t interact at all the entire book, but through flashbacks and internal dialogue, we get a clear image of what their relationship is like.

“They pay us to put their houses and perhaps their lives into order, to give them a sense that things are under control, to give them succour in newly clean and tidy worlds.”

I thought the mystery of where Janks had disappeared to was framed in a really interesting way because of the fact that we actually get to hear from his perspective as well. You’d think that because this removes the element of mystery that would usually drive a story forward, there wouldn’t be any build-up of suspense or tension to make it engaging, but it’s not like that at all. Because of the removal of doubt, this allows Lily’s experiences of cleaning other people’s houses to shine through. However, I often found Janks’ storyline not as fun to read as Lily’s and I wanted to hurry up and get back to her. The lack of quotation marks for dialogue was also sort of frustrating to me—punctuation exists for a reason! Aside from these minor negatives, I found it quite refreshing to be reading a story set in real areas I’m familiar with for a change.

When I first reached the ending, I was initially taken aback at how suddenly it stopped—almost anti-climactic in a way after I had just flown through the last twenty percent of the book in anticipation. Then the more time I had to think about it, the more I realised how perfect it was, almost hauntingly so. Spoilers ahead. The whole book I was waiting for Janks to return and the family to reunite, so the fact that none of this happened was a shock. But it wouldn’t make sense for them to go back to being a happy, united family—because that’s not reality, and if anything this book is an intimate look into reality. Having a ‘happy’ ending would defeat the entire purpose of this book’s existence! There is no neat and tidy resolution for the working class; there is no ‘end’ so to speak.

O’Reilly doesn’t spoon-feed anything to you, but also doesn’t make the story so dense that meaning can’t be made out. She doesn’t take her subject matter too seriously, but also doesn’t turn it into a cringe-worthy comedy. The balance of everything in Other Houses is brilliantly done.

TLDR: Other Houses takes a seemingly mundane premise and cleverly turns it into a witty commentary on class divide and societal issues in Australia. 4.5 stars.

[Louise · Rating 3 out of 5]

Other Houses was no trouble to keep reading as I really wanted to know what had happened to a significant character. I was however a little underwhelmed considering the reviews of the novel.

The hero of the novel is definitely the house cleaner Lily whose day to day work life is written about with insight into the trials of making the most of a far from satisfactory work scenario - living from pay day to pay day with little chance of advancement whilst holding ambitions for a better life. This all too common dilemma is, I think, the chief concern of the novel. Lily's trusting, co-operative relationship with her cleaning partner as well as her conflict plagued relationship with her teenage daughter are skilfully drawn and add to the contemporary and relatable feel of the novel.

[Oakleigh Irish · Rating 5 out of 5]

Other Houses is a wonderful piece of Australian suburban storytelling as battler Lily and her family fall foul of a bikie gang debt, after money is needed for a school excursion to Greece for their precocious and mutinous 15 year old daughter Jewelee. Other Houses has much to say about disadvantaged workers in the gig economy, as protagonist Lily and her best friend Shannon clean houses for Melbourne's privileged, wealthy and wasteful. Lily and her now disappeared husband are the quintessential working poor, living from paycheque to paycheque, at the mercy loan sharks and criminal gangs. Other Houses is beautifully written, the main characters are witty and engaging and narrative tension keep our interest right through the story.

[Maureen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the book that should be enforced reading for those who maintain that everyone can achieve in our society if they just work at it. The problems Lily faces are pretty insurmountable in the short term, perhaps her daughter can overcome them, but she'll always wonder about the fate of Janks and why he left them. Loved the commentary of the two cleaners on the personalities of the home owners they cleaned for, even though they never meet them. This author understands poverty and the working poor, but even more than that she has the skills to explain those lives to people who have never walked that path. More please.

[Lou Endicott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely loved this book despite it leaving me feeling heavy with the depiction of just how blutty hard it is to get out of a low socio economic and socially disadvantaged situation.

No spoilers, but the ending was very bitter sweet and a little abrupt. So much so I thought I had accidentally missed the last chapter on my eReader. But realised “oh no! Oh. That’s the end.”
I truly hoped for a different outcome for one of the lead characters. But all in all, this is an incredible portrayal of people trying to elevate themselves and give better opportunities to their child. Also, as a Melbournite I loved the description of the homes, the suburbs, the streets.

[Glenys · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of those books where readers will agree with ALL of the back-cover blurbs!
It is unusual but easy to relate to - those glimpses into other house, other lives.
The caring and kindness of the cleaners who know so much about people they have never met.
Being very familiar with Melbourne and its suburbs made it easy for me to visualise the settings, including Janks' trip to Eden - the furthest he had ever travelled (just over the state border)!
This book is unapologetically Australian.
'Other Houses' is filled with struggle, hard work, determination, friendships, humour and humanity.

[Lyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a gritty account of hard lives, lived pay packet to pay packet, and the desire to lift oneself up. The houses that the cleaners visit give up their stories, exposing the class divisions that, exist in modern Australia. Jank's battle with drugs and his bad judgment in seeking a loan made for interesting reading. I found the ending a little abrupt, perhaps I was hoping for a happy ever after ending.

[Olivia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this over a wkd. Couldn’t put it down. Every page something happens. In essence it is about a couple with a dark pass trying their best to do the best for their daughter. I felt the daughter could have perhaps be given a bit more of a voice so we know what she is thinking and why she acts like the brat that she is. However, lily the main narrator has so much soul and so raw in her hurt, pain and joy that, I really can’t criticise. Highly recommended.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 - I loved the premise of this book - a protagonist who works as a cleaner while dealing with the disintegration of their own family. The story world and characters felt real, and it brought those communities to life in an honest and unglamorous way. I felt that the pacing and plot was slightly lacking, there's a lot of build up with a slightly underwhelming ending. However, it was a great listen.

[Lana Levy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A real slice of life. These characters were flawed but realistic and compelling. I really wanted things to work out for them!

The plot was written really well - it didn’t feel like it was trying too hard to be an edgy regional Australian drug plot, it just felt honest. Very natural writing style.

This was an Interesting comparison to boy swallows universe - similar themes, very different execution. Other houses somehow managed to be polished and raw at the same time.

[Alistair · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lily works as a cleaner in other people’s houses along with her work partner Shannon. She is content with the work she does. Lily lives with her rebellious teenage daughter, Jewelee, and long-term partner, Janks. As the novel opens Janks has disappeared. Lily, sick with worry searches for him around the suburb into which they moved four years ago, principally to remove Jewelee from the Broadmeadows influence. As Lily observes, they moved into the worst house in one of the best streets. Money, always tight, becomes a pressing problem without Jank’s wage: how will Lily pay the bills? Alternately told through the voices of Lily and Janks, This Reader found Lily’s narrative more engaging than Jank’s. I can see why his story was needed for the plot development, however I would’ve been just as content to read about Lily’s relationships with her daughter and Shannon. One outstanding feature of O’Reilly’s writing is her judicious use of similes; they’re very good, and memorable.

[Denise Tannock · Rating 3 out of 5]

Such a sad book but I do see some hope for Lily and Jewelee but not so much for Janks. Lily tries so hard to get Jewelee away from the life Lily lived as she wants Jewelee to have an education and a better future. I hope this happens. Poor Janks was trying to help the girls but landed himself in trouble. I hope he can get away from this but I can't see how. Maybe a sequel is needed?

[Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A insightful look at those living with addiction and scarce resources.
Competent writing delving into significant social issues~ class [will it ever go away ??], poverty & drugs; it also deals with Melbourne's obsession[actually an Australian obsession] with property..of late off the boil due to the commencement of interest rates rising.
Life is shit !Eking out a meagre existence....

[Pip Snort · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book begins and ends in fragility and uncertainty. It realistically depicts the hideous challenge of living from hand to mouth. The idea that one can lift oneself up by ones bootstraps from the gutter to the stars is nonsense. This books shows us that very lie. But it also shows its power, the hope it contains. Living only in the now is very hard, tiring and grinds you away.

[Jaime · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed Other Houses. It is so well written. It is a humane and clever look at the lives of very relatable characters who are just trying to do the best for their daughter in a world where their options are limited.

[Lena · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really enjoying this book, it was beautifully written and real. I've only given 3 stars due to the abrupt ending. Did the author get tired of the story and decide to end it halfway? I was invested in the characters, and now I feel unsatisfied.