I hid this entire review due to spoilers (but mostly because I'm tired of everyone getting mad at me and misinterpreting what I'm trying to say). NOTE: I am coming in here a little over a year after writing this because I have changed a bit as a reader and reviewer, and want this, which is still getting eyes on it pretty constantly, to reflect that. 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 she return to the easy compatibility of her life with Julian or take a leap into the unknown with Edith? 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. A Hong Kong–born lawyer, striking and ambitious, Edith takes Ava to the theater and leaves her tulips in the hallway. When Julian’s job takes him back to London, she stays put, unsure where their relationship stands.Įnter Edith. 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 Ava befriends Julian, a witty British banker, he offers a shortcut into a lavish life her meager salary could never allow. 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. 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 lawyerĪva moved to Hong Kong to find happiness, but so far, it isn’t working out.

Exciting times a novel