20 January 2021
Exciting Times
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 moved to Hong Kong to find happiness, but so far, it isn’t working out. Since she left Dublin, she’s been spending her days teaching English to rich children—she’s been assigned the grammar classes because she lacks warmth—and her nights avoiding petulant roommates in her cramped apartment.
When Ava befriends Julian, a witty British banker, he offers a shortcut into a lavish life her meager salary could never allow. Ignoring her feminist leanings and her better instincts, Ava finds herself moving into Julian’s apartment, letting him buy her clothes, and, eventually, striking up a sexual relationship with him. When Julian’s job takes him back to London, she stays put, unsure where their relationship stands.
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. Ava has been carefully pretending that Julian is nothing more than an absentee roommate, so when Julian announces that he’s returning to Hong Kong, she faces a fork in the road. Should she 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.
| Title | : | Exciting Times |
| Edition Language | : | English |
| ISBN | : | 9780062968746 |
| Format Type | : |
Readers Also Enjoyed Exciting Times
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Where to even begin.Well, I suppose I will begin with the Lofty Assumption that most of you reading this review have not read this book, because the only reason I even justified myself finishing it is...
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2 ½ stars (rounded up to 3)“I felt I had hitherto woefully misdirected my energies in attempting to cultivate a personality. If you didn’t have one then that left more room for everyone else’s....
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I can see why Sally Rooney is endorsing this! Debut novelist Naoise Dolan tells the story of 22-year-old Ava who just moved from Ireland to Hongkong, trying to figure out what to do with her life. She...
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2.5 starsSo dreary... definitely not exciting... Exciting Times is told from Ava’s perspective. Ava is an Irish expat living in Hong Kong, where she teaches English. The story focuses on Ava’s inn...
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This novel is a tedious account of one girl’s romantic flings during a year of living and working in Hong Kong. Heavily influenced by Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’ in terms of the tiresome in...
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Naoise Dolan has been trying to distinguish herself from Sally Rooney. The problem is, 'Exciting Times' is essentially a queer novel in the style of Rooney. The prose is spare and frustrating and the ...
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Oh my goodness. This book is incredibly fine. Now I know what the phrase ‘razor sharp wit’ really means. On a sentence level the novel delivers one perfect zinger after another. Dolan is particula...
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Dolan excels in sharp and fun sentences, but that’s not enough to carry a novel revolving about the unexciting travails of an indecisive and indolent millennialI wanted other people to care more abo...
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If you think this book is going to be like Normal People, it isn't. 2.5 stars.Having seen the comparison floating around, I was excited to give this book a shot. I also knew that the main character wa...
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Exciting Times is the most Sally Rooney book to have not been penned by Sally Rooney. In a way that statement is overly reductive of Naoise Dolan's fresh and distinctive voice, but still, the fact r...