I wouldn’t be surprised if it emerges as the book of the summer.… A rich, sharply witty story made out of the frictions and complexities of young love…. Exciting Times is… edifying, funny, tender, plangent and rich with the sensibility of an individual who, condemned to conditions that are not of her making, finds the space that she needs to take flight, and who proceeds as the person she was. The prevailing experience of endeavor is one of invigoration. In fewer than 250 pages, has captured the touchstone millennial tension between sardonicism and sincerity-the electric ambivalence of figuring out how to be a person in these times.… Exciting Times is a funny novel (both haha and weird), resisting the pull of melodrama in favor of a sharp point of view and… engaged with the ways class, inequality and politics manifest in social life. They form a digital counterbalance to Ava's aloof and guarded in-person presence, and capture perfectly the nauseating insecurity of growing up today. Ava is hyper-verbal and exacting, and… written correspondences-social media posts and emails she labors over, analyzes, doesn't send or sends by accident-become increasingly vulnerable in their disclosures…. wry and bracing tale of class and privilege…. Exciting Times is her first novel, an excerpt from which was published in The Stinging Fly by Sally Rooney. She studied English literature at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford University.

Naoise Dolan is an Irish writer born in Dublin. 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. Politically alert, heartbreakingly raw, and dryly funny, Exciting Times is thrillingly attuned to the great freedoms and greater uncertainties of modern love. Should Ava return to the easy compatibility of her life with Julian or take a leap into the unknown with Edith? Ava wants to be her-and wants her.Īnd then Julian writes to tell Ava he is coming back to Hong Kong…. A Hong Kong–born lawyer, striking and ambitious, Edith takes Ava to the theater and leaves her tulips in the hallway.

But when she asks whether he loves her, he cannot say more than 'I like you a great deal.'Įnter Edith. A banker who likes to spend money on Ava, to have sex and discuss fluctuating currencies with her. 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.Īva, newly arrived in Hong Kong from Dublin, spends her days teaching English to rich children.

Exciting times novel