Reading Order
Exciting Times Reading Order
Naoise Dolan's Exciting Times (2020) is the Dublin satirical novel about Ava, a twenty-two-year-old Irish woman teaching English in Hong Kong who becomes involved simultaneously with Julian, a British banker who lets her live in his flat while he travels, and Edith, a Hong Kong-born lawyer. Written in a dry, cool, precision-tooled prose that the author has described as influenced by Jane Austen and Sally Rooney, it is a novel about money, class, intimacy, and the specific anxieties of a young educated Irish woman in a post-austerity world she did not design.
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Exciting Times
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Exciting Times
Naoise Dolan·2020·Stand-alone debut. Dolan's second novel, The Happy Couple (2023), follows different characters in a Dublin milieu and can be read independently.
Exciting Times — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Exciting Times similar to Normal People?
Exciting Times is the novel most frequently compared to Normal People and to Sally Rooney's work generally — both are about young educated Irish characters navigating intimacy and class in cool, restrained prose. The comparison is apt but limited: Dolan's prose is drier and more Austenian in its ironic precision, her narrator Ava is more self-consciously defended than Rooney's protagonists, and the Hong Kong setting gives the novel a different kind of cultural dislocation. Readers who love one typically love the other, but they are distinct achievements.
Is Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan a debut novel?
Yes — Exciting Times (2020) is Naoise Dolan's debut novel, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK and Ecco Press in the US. Dolan was twenty-seven when the novel was published. Her second novel, The Happy Couple (2023), also set in Dublin, has been praised as a confirmation that her debut was not a fluke, though most readers consider Exciting Times the stronger of the two.
What should I read after Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan?
Readers who loved Exciting Times typically move to Normal People and Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney — the Irish literary fiction most directly comparable in prose style and social preoccupations. Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan is the other Irish literary novel of the same generation that most closely parallels Dolan's interest in a young woman's self-destructive romantic choices. For something with Dolan's ironic precision but a British setting, Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy is the natural comparison in the tradition of the literary novel of female observation.
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