Naoise Dolan

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.

A Novel

Exciting Times

Mari-Claire Parrin

sina (she/her) 

Julia Briganti

abi a

We'd known each other about two months, and in total I'd spent perhaps thirty hours in his company-little more than a day. But I was in the habit of thinking he was a habit.

You could go manless entirely, and I saw a great deal of elegance in that approach, but enough people felt otherwise that I thought it best to have one. You had to pretend to feel sad if you'd been single too long. I hated doing that because there were other things I was actually sad about.

The trouble with my body was that I had to carry it around with me.

“Everyone does that, Ava," she said. “You keep describing yourself as this uniquely damaged person, when a lot of it is completely normal. I think you want to feel special--which is fair, who doesn't-but you won't allow yourself to feel special in a good way, so you tell yourself you're especially bad."

 It had never made sense to me that men thought women they'd had sex with would like to hear them be unkind about other women they'd had sex with. You would have to be a raging egomaniac, I thought, to think those men didn't also speak about you that way.

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