Recommendations
Books Like Exciting Times
Best books to read after Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan
Naoise Dolan's Exciting Times is the debut Irish novel about Ava in Hong Kong — class, money, and two simultaneous relationships in dry, Austenian prose. These recommendations explore the tradition of the contemporary Irish literary novel, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the novel about a young educated woman navigating intimacy and self-interest with more intelligence than happiness.
- 1Buy
Normal People
by Sally Rooney
The essential Irish literary companion — Connell and Marianne in Sligo and Dublin; the novel most frequently paired with Exciting Times in reviews and reading lists, sharing Dolan's cool prose, interest in class and intimacy, and commitment to showing how young educated Irish people actually think about love and money.
- 2Buy
Conversations with Friends
by Sally Rooney
The companion debut Rooney — Frances and Bobbi entangled with a married couple; shares Exciting Times's interest in a young Irish woman's cool, defensive intelligence and her tendency to observe the dynamics of her relationships more clearly than she can act on that observation.
- 3Buy
The Happy Couple
by Naoise Dolan
Dolan's second novel — a Dublin couple in the period before their wedding, told in chapters from alternating perspectives; more structurally ambitious than Exciting Times, though most readers find the debut the stronger of the two; essential reading for Dolan fans.
- 4Buy
Acts of Desperation
by Megan Nolan
The companion Irish literary novel of the same generation — an unnamed narrator's obsessive relationship with a Danish man in Dublin; darker and more emotionally raw than Exciting Times, but the novel of Irish female self-destruction that most directly parallels Dolan's interest in the psychology of intelligent women in bad relationships.
- 5Buy
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
by Ottessa Moshfegh
The companion in the tradition of the literary novel of cool female detachment — Moshfegh's unnamed narrator in Manhattan; shares Exciting Times's commitment to a self-aware, ironic female voice that describes its own situation with precision rather than warmth.
- 6Buy
Prep
by Curtis Sittenfeld
The American companion in the tradition of the literary novel about a young woman negotiating a social world more powerful than she is — Lee Fiora at a Massachusetts boarding school; shares Exciting Times's interest in how class operates between young people who are theoretically equals but who understand very clearly that they are not.
- 7Buy
Beautiful World, Where Are You
by Sally Rooney
Rooney's third novel — two women in their thirties asking whether beauty and private happiness are possible in the current world; the Rooney novel that most directly parallels Exciting Times's interest in the difficulty of being a young educated woman who thinks too much about her own life.
- 8Buy
Outline
by Rachel Cusk
The companion in the tradition of the literary novel of cool, observational female narration — Cusk's narrator in Athens, listening rather than speaking; the literary predecessor that most clearly illuminates Dolan's interest in a female consciousness that withholds itself while acutely registering everyone else.
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