“This debut novel about an Irish expat millennial teaching English and finding romance in Hong Kong is half Sally Rooney love triangle, half glitzy Crazy Rich Asians high living—and guaranteed to please.” —Vogue
A RECOMMENDED BOOK FROM:The New York Times Book Review * Vogue * TIME * Marie Claire * Elle * O, the Oprah Magazine * The Washington Post * Esquire * Harper’s Bazaar * Bustle * PopSugar … Review * Vogue * TIME * Marie Claire * Elle * O, the Oprah Magazine * The Washington Post * Esquire * Harper’s Bazaar * Bustle * PopSugar * Refinery 29 * LitHub * Debutiful
An intimate, bracingly intelligent debut novel about a millennial Irish expat who becomes entangled in a love triangle with a male banker and a female lawyer
Ava, newly arrived in Hong Kong from Dublin, spends her days teaching English to rich children.
Julian is a banker. A banker who likes to spend money on Ava, to have sex and discuss fluctuating currencies with her. But when she asks whether he loves her, he cannot say more than “I like you a great deal.”
Enter Edith. A Hong Kong–born lawyer, striking and ambitious, Edith takes Ava to the theater and leaves her tulips in the hallway. Ava wants to be her—and wants her.
And then Julian writes to tell Ava he is coming back to Hong Kong… Should Ava return to the easy compatibility of her life with Julian or take a leap into the unknown with Edith?
Politically alert, heartbreakingly raw, and dryly funny, Exciting Times is thrillingly attuned to the great freedoms and greater uncertainties of modern love. In stylish, uncluttered prose, Naoise Dolan dissects the personal and financial transactions that make up a life—and announces herself as a singular new voice.
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Didn’t finish reading…not my kind of book. I found myself not quite following what was going on nor could I relate to the characters. just not for me…
Ava leaves Ireland to take a badly paid job teaching English in Hong Kong, hoping to make a fresh start, or something, she’s not sure what. It’s a cramped and stifling life at first in a city where she finds it still difficult to make friends and be herself, whoever that is. Then she meets Julian a wealthy British banker who seems content to spend money on her. They form a cryptic duo, speaking in a code that Ava understands only half the time, until, while Julian is away, Edith enters the scene and Ava begins to change. But can she face the woman that she finds herself becoming?
This book was touted as being the one that would fill the Sally Rooney hole and for me that would take some effort. I read it with a skeptical eye and gradually came to admire the acerbic eye and sharp wit the author uses to dissect not only the characters but Irish culture.
Naoise Dolan’s debut novel is exciting times indeed. It centres around Ava, a sarcastic and spiky twenty something Irish expat in Hong Kong with a crippling fear of any level of intimacy, and her romantic entanglements with two very different partners. On the one hand there’s Julian, a self-satisfied and emotionally vacant Old Etonian with whom she lives rent free and has sex but who is emphatically not her boyfriend and on the other there’s Edith, a brilliant and beautiful lawyer who makes Ava feel all warm and fuzzy inside unironically (the horror). In the grand tradition of the protagonists of coming of age novels (and indeed twenty somethings in real life) making life way harder than it needs to be, choosing between the two proves difficult. This book is getting compared a lot to Sally Rooney’s debut novel, Conversations With Friends, seemingly stemming from the fact that both books are observant and emotionally intelligent first outings by young female authors about Irish bisexuals making questionable romantic decisions due to a combination of self-loathing, millennial ennui and fear of being truly known (fair enough tbh). However, what the comparisons are missing is how bloody funny Naoise Dolan is – not only did I wince and empathise with her characters and the tangled webs they wove, but I full on belly laughed multiple times. I also love the way she writes about the British class system from an Irish perspective, she puts things into words that I’ve been feeling for a long time. Highly recommend!
I have to say I loved this book to pieces. It just hit me at the right time. Thank you for Naoise Dolan for her snarky writing and uneven (said in the most loving way) characters!
This is one of those books that I think I was supposed to like a lot more than I did, and it’s all due to the beginning. It took a long time to get going, and it took a long time for me to get into it.
Ava herself isn’t all that interesting, but I’m not sure she’s intended to be. Rather, she is there to be imprinted upon by Julian and Edith, the former of whom makes his intentions known, even as Ava tries to convince herself otherwise. Edith, on the other hand, is far more direct. You never doubt what she wants.
By the time this story clicks and starts moving, you might feel it’s too late. You endured a lot of s-l-o-w plot (and character) development, so when Ava is presented with a dilemma, you may not care as much as you think you should.
This book has been recommended by quite a few impressive organizations, and it routinely is labeled as “smart.” Naoise Dolan’s writing is, unquestionably, more high-brow than not, and the ending is perfect. But to compare her to Sally Rooney seems a bit of a stretch.
Ava, twenty-two years old, has moved to Hong Kong to decide what to do next in her life. She accepts a low-paying position as a teacher of English in a Hong Kong school. She doesn’t like her flat mates and ends up moving in with a twenty-nine-year-old banker named Julian. When Julian must return to London for three months, Ava finds herself attracted to a lawyer, Edith, a native of Hong Kong.
The main character, Ava, is angsty, immature, and shallow. Julian, the man Ava lives with, is distant, controlling, shallow, and, at times, emotionally abusive. What about these characters would make a good novel? In addition, the author doesn’t bother to use Hong Kong to the fullest extent possible. While it is evident that the author wanted to write a novel with complex characters and multiple issues, all she succeeded in doing is writing a novel about self-absorbed and deeply flawed characters.
This was not an easy read because of the author’s lack of character development and its stream-of-consciousness style of writing. The author tried very hard to make this novel seem intelligent and oh-so-sophisticated, and all she managed to do is to bore her readers to tears.
My thanks to the publisher for an eARC.