DESCRIPTION

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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Naoise Dolan is an Irish writer born in Dublin. She studied English literature at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford University. Exciting Times is her first novel, an excerpt from which was published in The Stinging Fly by Sally Rooney.

REVIEWS

"That dive into human consciousness . . . separates Dolan from the countrywoman to whom she is often compared, novelist Sally Rooney ("Normal People"). While both writers deal with class -- offering cutting observations -- Dolan pushes further to confront why we put up with it in the first place."—Washington Post

”Wry, stylish.... In this witty satire of the haves and have nots, Dolan explores tender, insightful truths about the vagaries of modern love.—Esquire

”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 ... Kept me rapt until the final page.”-—The Times (UK)

"The prevailing experience of [Dolan's] endeavor is one of invigoration. "Exciting Times" is a work of phenomenal acuity and vehemence that, in the freshness of its apprehensions and the authority of its voice, 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."—Seattle Times

"In fewer than 250 pages, [Dolan] has captured the touchstone millennial tension between sardonicism and sincerity -- the electric ambivalence of figuring out how to be a person in these times. . . . Dolan has buttoned-up elocution, taut phrasing and sharp angles. . . . Exciting Times is a funny novel (both haha and weird), resisting the pull of melodrama in favor of a sharp point of view and an intense concern with language. . . . [and] is indeed engaged with the ways class, inequality and politics manifest in social life."—Los Angeles Times

"A love story packed with irony and introspection."—Elle

"[Exciting Times] teems with insight around class, race, language and sexuality. Likely to fill the Sally-Rooney-shaped hole in many readers' lives."—Irish Times

"Incisive and funny.... [Dolan's] bold, sardonic narrative voice is original and, at times, irresistible.... This is a sharp-eyed novel that tackles serious ideas.... Dolan's novel -- wry and jaded, yet sometimes hopeful -- understands this volatile era."—Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Dolan has an ear for the mixture of insinuation, implication, silent scolding, deep concern and unbending love in the mother's Irish voice. It's flawless. As is Ava's way of listening to Julian, her upper-class English boyfriend. Dolan analyzes how the English language and the Irish ear try to make sense of each other." —Colm Tóibín, WSJ Magazine

”Exciting Times is constant fun.”—Telegraph (UK)

"Wonderfully intuitive and fluid.... An examination of sex, queerness, self-sabotage, power, and privilege.—New Yorker