REVIEW: Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan

Despite the inescapable comparisons to Sally Rooney, there’s something deliciously Austenian about Naoise Dolan’s sharp and brilliant debut novel, Exciting Times. Reading it, you enter a world with its own intricate social networks, in which many of the characters blow the whistle on their own absurdity while a dryly witty protagonist looks on. But instead of being blissfully detached from the unfolding drama, you find yourself neck-deep in it and exposed. It’s fantastic.

Naoise Dolan

Exciting Times follows a young woman named Ava. A middle class Irish expatriate teaching English to wealthy children in Hong Kong, Ava’s loneliness and self-loathing drives her into a relationship with a rich British banker named Julian, a man almost clinically detached from his emotions with a circle of insufferable friends. When Julian leaves for London on a business trip, Ava finds herself drifting into friendship with a lawyer named Edith. Sweet, frank and earnest, Edith awakens within Ava a fierce hunger for love and sincerity, and soon their friendship becomes something much more. At which point Julian returns from London.

If love triangles aren’t your thing, let me appeal to your sense of humour. As an observation of class relations, particularly between Irish and British people, Exciting Times is masterful. It’s also wickedly funny, with a precise and excoriating aim – one colourfully awful character is described as being like ‘Three Mitford sisters in a trench coat’. It’s the kind of humour that makes you laugh out loud and Dolan wields it like a weapon to illuminate the interlocking circles of privilege within which Ava moves. She is a fascinating protagonist, being both ensnared by and yet somehow detached from Julian’s world. You might even say that she’s the ultimate witty, self-deprecating millennial heroine – the Fleabag archetype pushed to a political precipice. What is so captivating about Ava is that she is so deeply embroiled in disgust at her own capacity for moral compromise that she cannot seem to find a way out of it, at least without the guidance of someone of Edith’s candor.

When it’s not being funny, Exciting Times is thoughtful and a tender love story emerges from its quieter moments. This isn’t to say that the humour is a mask, but by the time you reach the final pages you find yourself yearning for the kind of closure that comes from genuine human connection. Ultimately, this is a novel about finding a way to live with yourself.

With Exciting Times, Naoise Dolan has done a rare and wonderful thing and rewritten the novel of manners for our weird digital age. It might make you feel a little less alone by the time you’re done with it.

—Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan (Hachette Books Australia) is out now.

Exciting Times

by Naoise Dolan

Naoise Dolan explodes onto the scene with Exciting Times, a slyly humorous and scorchingly smart modern love story about three cynics in Hong Kong

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 lawyer. Refreshingly enthusiastic and unapologetically earnest...

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Olivia Fricot

Olivia Fricot (she/her) is Booktopia's Senior Content Producer and editor of the Booktopian blog. She has too many plants and not enough bookshelves, and you can usually find her reading, baking, or talking to said plants. She is pro-Oxford comma.

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