Exciting Times
Naoise Dolan's debut novel follows Ava, a sharp, underemployed Irish woman teaching grammar to wealthy Hong Kong children while she figures out what she actually wants. She drifts into the orbit of Julian, a posh English banker who lets her live rent free in his apartment and treats their arrangement with deliberate ambiguity. When Julian leaves the city for an extended London assignment, Ava meets Edith, a Hong Kong born lawyer whose warmth, ambition, and emotional candor expose how much Ava has been settling. The novel unfolds in clipped, observational prose that anatomizes class, colonial residue, and the small humiliations of expat life, drawing inevitable comparisons to Sally Rooney while landing in distinctly drier, more political territory. Beneath the witty texting and currency conversion lies a serious story about whether a young queer woman raised on irony can let herself be loved without flinching.
Where Exciting Times keeps showing up
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What you might want to know about Exciting Times
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Twenty-two-year-old Ava moves from Dublin to Hong Kong to teach English and lands in an entanglement with Julian, an English banker, and Edith, a Hong Kong lawyer. The novel watches her drift between them.
Yes. Naoise Dolan's debut Exciting Times is widely compared to Sally Rooney for its young Irish narrator, dialogue-driven literary style, and focus on class, sexuality, and modern relationships. Both authors are often grouped in the same wave.
No. Exciting Times is a standalone. Naoise Dolan published a second standalone novel, The Happy Couple, in 2023.
Exciting Times was written by Naoise Dolan, published in 2020 by Orion Publishing Group, Limited.
Exciting Times is 248 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Exciting Times takes most readers 4 to 5 hours to finish.
Exciting Times is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
