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    Exciting Times: A Novel
    Exciting Times: A Novel
    Exciting Times: A Novel
    Audiobook6 hours

    Exciting Times: A Novel

    Written by Naoise Dolan

    Narrated by Aoife McMahon

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    “This debut novel about an Irish expat millennial teaching English and finding romance in Hong Kong is half Sally Rooney love triangle, half glitzy Crazy Rich Asians high living—and guaranteed to please.” —Vogue 

    AN ANTICIPATED BOOK FROM:
    Vogue * Elle * O, the Oprah Magazine * Esquire * Harper's Bazaar * PopSugar * LitHub

    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.

    Editor's Note

    Modern love triangle…

    One of the most anticipated novels of the summer, “Exciting Times” tells the story of Ava, an Irish expat working as an English teacher for rich children in Hong Kong. She quickly finds herself entangled in a love triangle with wealthy banker Julian and dynamic attorney Edith (who Ava both wants to be like and be with). Fascinating geopolitics, dissections of class, and old fashioned romance make this debut by Naoise Dolan shine.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJun 2, 2020
    ISBN9780062968760
    Author

    Naoise Dolan

    Naoise Dolan is an Irish writer born in Dublin. Her debut novel, Exciting Times, was a Sunday Times bestseller, widely translated, and optioned for television. She has been short-listed and long-listed for several prizes, including the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. She lives in Berlin.

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    Reviews for Exciting Times

    3.5/5

    530 ratings21 reviews

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      This was a great debut! The incisive, droll commentary on race, sexuality, class and relationships were mostly engaging. Ava is a protagonist at emotional distance with herself, and because the book is narrated by her, said emotional distance could feel clinical at times. I also despised Julian, so some passages with him felt overly long. All the same, I enjoyed this book and will read Naoise Dolan's future work — that said, would highly recommend the audiobook as it makes the narration more engaging.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Interesting book, yet I'm not sure I got it completely. There were some aspects of it that I found engaging and interesting, but some other things I could not get into. The thought process of the main character was hard to follow for me at times, and some of the things said where a bit off putting, but I guess they were there for that exact reason. The ending I didn't get completely so I might have to re-read it physically to fully grasp it. I have to mention though, I am not a native speaker so some words or phrases I did not understand. That might have added to my confusion. I don't think this is a bad book and I would recommend it if you are interested in reading a Sapphic literary fiction book with an unconventional love triangle that explores anger, confusion and love in your 20s set in Hong Kong.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 1/5
      I hated pretty much everything about this book. The characters were superficial and underdeveloped, and the plot was maddening. I also couldn’t stand the audiobook narrator’s monotone character voices. It just made me hate the characters more. Maybe I wouldn’t have hated the book quite as much with a better reader.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I enjoy the portrayal of the relationship, the instability of the people involved in those relations.
      The multicultural and the intersections of the various cultures have woven perfectly in the story.
      And last but not least, how the author has well shown how people suffer from the difficulty of expressing their emotions and feeling.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I really enjoyed this book, the beginning of it was okay but as you proceed it definitely gets a lot better

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      It’s a cute book. Slow to start. Very surface with a happy ending.
    • 5/5
      The characters were fleshed out well in this book. Wanted it to be longer so I can stay in their heads more.
    • 3/5
      Very slow, very average, I expected so much more, I don’t know what the author was trying to say. Was very random imo
    • 5/5
      Brilliantly witty and caustically Irish. Also an interesting modern look into ex-pat life in Hong Kong.
    • 4/5
      This was a bit more of a fit with me than Normal People, but it makes me feel like an elder millennial to jive much more with Fleishman Is In Trouble than with Normal People or Exciting Times!

      Exciting Times stars Ava, a bisexual Irish expat living in Hong Kong. I found her at times obnoxious, frustrating, relatable, and almost inspirational. Is it that she's actually "cold," or that she keeps her emotions under lock (choosing not to reveal them, though they're there)? Is her self-loathing healthy introspection and reflection, or something else? The answers to these questions seemed to shift throughout the novel, and though it's a short book, they give the reader something to chew on.

      I personally didn't care for the little asides about language. While some of them were interesting, more often than not, they took me out of the story. (I'm sure they'll add to the story for some.)

      Probably about a 3.5-star read for me, and I'll certainly keep Dolan on my radar.
    • 3/5
      It was an okay read, nothing really bad but it was a tad bit boring and slow. The end was very underwhelming.
    • 4/5
      I really liked it but it ended abruptly. I wish there was one more chapter.
    • 3/5
      I thought it was interesting to listen to the self internal dialogue that is often so negative. The book ended so abruptly it took me by surprise.
    • 1/5
      Absolutely despised the narrator. I felt like she was so superficial and petty, could not relate or be interested in her at all. Good at men, hating everything else. I stopped halfway through after pushing myself for weeks to continue. It did not get better at all for me. Time to move on.
    • 3/5
      I read that she's been compared to Sally Rooney, and I guess that's why I dislike both their books. I found the dialogue between Ava and Julian very hard to read - they were both extremely passive-aggressive, and seemed to accept that as a normal relationship. Even when she met and supposedly fell in love with Edith, the relationship just wasn't quite believable. Shallow, not normal, people.
    • 2/5
      2.5 stars, because I liked the writing style but not so much the story.
      The endorsement from Hilary Mantel on the cover calls it "Droll, shrewd, and unafraid". I agree with droll, and I can understand shrewd and unafraid but I wouldn't have picked those latter two.

      The book is primarily about a person who projects her self-hate onto her relationships. It starts off quirky and comical, but it doesn't jump far enough from that point for me. The middle section of the book where she's happy (but doesn't want to accept/believe it) was actually the more enjoyable section, but then it reverts to more of the first section. She isn't honest with herself and sabatoges the relationship with the person who holds up a mirror to her, even though it was that relationship that made her happy.

      Yes, it works out for her or she comes to her senses in the end, but that is only two pages long and barely explained, so it feels like the reader gets denied that progress.

      My other observation of the story is how time stamped the story is. Smartphone and its 20somethings cultural norms will not be the same in even two years, likely, and so I wonder if the book will last. Or will it need a glossary at the back -- there were references that I didn't understand today, so how will someone get it when those cultural pieces are obsolete? Or will it serve as a anthropology resource for its capture of a culture? Does timelessness matter in a book even?

      I'd read the author again, if the next book isn't shelved under romance.
    • 4/5
      My one fiction title of the quarter. The protagonist is an Irish teacher of English in Hong Kong, trying to find herself and getting entangled in romantic relationships with a somewhat older expat man and a young Hong Kong woman at the same time. I found it to be a fascinating take on a young 20s character trying to make sense of intimacy and find one's place in the world. She probably could have condensed the first 100 pages into 25, but it does help the reader grok how unusual the dynamic between the narrator and her boyfriend really is, before the girlfriend enters the picture.
    • 3/5
      Whether or not you'll like Naoise Dolan's debut novel depends largely on what you think about Sally Rooney's novels. It's not that they are both young Irish women, but that they are writing about self-contained young women who have trouble looking outside of themselves or viewing people as independent creatures and they think primarily about their sexual and romantic relationships. I liked one of Rooney's novels and not the other. I found Exciting Times to be ok. Ava is Irish and working as an English-language (TEFL) teacher in Hong Kong, teaching grammar to schoolchildren. She meets an English banker and while their relationship is decidedly not romantic, he invites her to move into his spare bedroom. He's detached and unemotional and busy, so a relationship based on convenience works for him. It works for Ava since housing in Hong Kong is expensive and Julian is an easy roommate, although she thinks endlessly about their relationship and its parameters. She's not in love, but she wouldn't mind if Julian were, as long as he still gave her her space. And she misses him when he's on business trips. It's while he's on a long business trip that she meets Edith and falls for her. What follows is a simple love story complicated by Ava's endless analysis of her feelings, Edith's feelings and endless deconstructions of their every interaction.The parts of this novel where Ava emerges from self-reflection to ponder the differences between British and Irish English or when she notices that the kids she's teaching are individuals and interesting are wonderful. The endless navel gazing got old for me, but not so old that I wanted to stop reading. I would have loved to have seen what happens were Ava to stop watching herself and began participating in her own life, but that's not the book Dolan wrote.
    • 4/5
      I listened to the audiobook in one day. Fantastic reader. The plot was good. Very light read that was driven by plot.
    • 3/5
      Although this book was well-written, I was not the intended audience for it. Ava moves from Dublin to Hong Kong. She is an intelligent loner and when she finds herself unhappy with her roommates, she snags a wealthy man and moves in with him. When he moves back to London, she meets Mei Ling, a wealthy lawyer from a well-to-do Chinese family. With a new romantic interest, Ava moves into Mei Ling’s apartment. Are all British ex-pats this insensitive to what is going on around them in Hong Kong? Are they all this self-absorbed?
    • 4/5
      Can there be too many twenty-something, steam-of-consciousness, acerbically witty books? As a boring, middle-aged professional reader, I tend to think so, but Naoise Dolan has written a pretty good one. The main twenty-something in Exciting Times is Ava, who has traveled from her home in Dublin to Hong Kong--maybe to find herself, maybe to get away from her family. She teaches English to children and ends up living with Julian, who she loves but doesn’t like. As with most of these books, there is not much plot, but enough to keep the book moving as we listen to Ava worry and think about everything. Hong Kong plays a nice backdrop, and there are lots of funny Irish/British bashing moments and human nature observations. Dolan cannot escape comparisons to Sally Rooney, and with good reason, but if you liked Normal People, then Exciting Times is a good match.