Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan (2020): A Review

Title: Exciting Times

Author: Naoise Dolan

Publication Year: 2020

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐💫

Pages: 240

Source: audiobook @storytel.tr

Genre: Romance, Queer, Humor

Awards: Shortlisted for Blackwell's Book of the Year Debut Novel ; Shortlisted for Irish Book Awards Newcomer; Shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award; Shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year; Shortlisted for British Book Awards - Début Book of the Year; Shortlisted for Dalkey Literary Award - Emerging Author; Longlisted for Desmond Elliott Prize; Longlisted for Dylan Thomas Prize; Longlisted for Women's Prize for Fiction

Continuing my British(-ish) literature marathon, I picked up Exciting Times (2020) by Irish author Naoise Dolan, much-hyped and sprinkled with shortlists and longlists like academic confetti. I’m convinced most of those nominations were earned by the first half of the book. The second half? Let’s just say… total disappointment.

We follow Ava, an Irish English teacher who flees Dublin to teach in Hong Kong. As an English teacher myself, this was painfully, gloriously relatable. I was laughing at scenes that honestly felt like they had been stolen from my own lesson plans and then made slightly more depressing. I even shared some bits with my students — which probably says terrible things about my pedagogy but great things about Dolan’s observational comedy.

Of course, teaching isn’t the point of the story. It’s mainly the excuse Ava uses to:

1. Escape her life.
2. Correct other people’s grammar for money in a former British colony.
3. Meet Julian, a British banker in Hong Kong, so the colonial power dynamic can stroll onstage wearing a name tag.

Because yes, the book absolutely knows what it’s doing with power structures: Irish teacher, British banker, in Hong Kong, all navigating money, class, language, and empire. Ava keeps consciously foregrounding this, poking at it, mocking it, and making us laugh while also reminding us that the whole setup is basically late-capitalist colonial fanfiction with a banking salary.

Julian and Ava’s relationship is wonderfully weird. It’s not Romance with a capital R, even when Ava occasionally tries to cosplay as someone who wants that. Mostly, she doesn’t. Or she says she doesn’t. Or she doesn’t know. Honestly, by page 100, I was no longer sure what anyone wanted, but I was deeply entertained. The dry humor, the razor-sharp one-liners, the petty observations about class, language, and empire — that was why I kept turning pages and cackling.

And then.

Then comes Edith.

Edith is supposedly the great love Ava has been waiting for — the True Feelings, the queer awakening, the emotional payoff. In theory, I should have been thrilled. In practice, I watched the book swerve from brilliantly awkward anti-romance into a kind of discount emotional arc I would generously describe as: Buy One Personality, Get One Regression Free.

As soon as Edith enters, Ava’s characterisation starts gradually sliding backwards like it’s on a greased conveyor belt. All that sharp, self-aware engagement with power, money, and colonial dynamics? Still there in the background, still smart, still making fun of itself — especially the Irish-versus-British dynamic in a post-colonial setting like Hong Kong — but now it’s competing with a romance that feels oddly… cheap. And Edith’s characterisation? Let’s say disappointing.

By the end, I was staring at the last pages thinking: what on earth just happened? Did we read the same first half? Did someone swap manuscripts midway through and no one told the editor? Edith alone cost this book at least 1.5 stars in my mind. Not because she exists, but because every time she appeared, Ava became less interesting and the story traded its sharp, postcolonial, class-conscious weirdness for a much flatter emotional payoff.