Books by Naoise Dolan
“Crammed with rapier-sharp one-liners and an almost academic analysis of social interaction, Exciting Times’ caustic wit made me laugh out loud, then nod in agreement.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
Another novel from a gifted young Trinity College alumni, Dolan’s newly-published Exciting Times is set in Hong Kong, but satirises a similar social circle to those of Rooney’s novels: highflying British and Irish ex-pats working for investment banks and corporate law firms. (One can imagine the characters of Exciting Times lurking in the background at Marianne’s student parties only a few years previously.) Ava, a hard-up TEFL teacher, begins socialising with this fast crowd when she starts sleeping with Julian, an emotionally withdrawn Old Etonian, but finds her ironic detachment challenged when she falls for the hardworking, earnest Edith. Skewering the social mores and snobbery of the young bourgeois, and – like Rooney – turning a gimlet eye upon the intricacies of interaction-by-social-media, Exciting Times is a book of one-liners and catty asides that will make you bark with laughter.
From our article Books like Normal People
Interviews where books by Naoise Dolan were recommended
Notable Novels of Summer 2020, recommended by Cal Flyn
No writer could resent you losing track of the new novels being published into the chaos of summer 2020 – with the world on lockdown and protestors taking to the streets. But fiction can offer respite from a relentless news cycle, writes Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn – and an opportunity to consider our own lives and choices through the prism of others’.
