“Some people,” Edith said, “fit a great many misogynist tropes into their personal lives.”

I don’t remember the last time I did such a big u-turn on a book. At the start I considered DNFing, frustrated with the emotionally stunted characters and poor decision-making. About a third of the way through, I thought ‘this just got interesting’ and from that point on I was invested. I began to understand the characters and their relationships (even if I didn’t agree with them), and I was gripped until the very end.

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Ava is a young Irish expat, working as a TEFL teacher in Hong Kong. The main plot is Ava navigating an excessively complicated love-life, first with Julian, a sociopathic Eton-educated banker, where the lines between friends-with-benefits and ‘kept woman’ begin to blur. When he leaves for a few months on a business trip she strikes up a friendship and then a romantic relationship with Edith, a Hong Kong lawyer who, while confident and self-assured, isn’t out to her parents.

It takes a while to get to know Ava as a character, and she deliberately keeps us at arms length. She is quite detached from her own emotions, for reasons that come to light towards the end of the book, sometimes sabotaging her own happiness or refusing to explore why she feels certain ways. I couldn’t help but warm to her, as frustrating as some as her decisions were, and I found some moments – particularly when she talks about her relationship with her queerness – that spoke so strongly to my own experiences that I couldn’t help but feel Dolan had plucked them from my brain. By the end you can’t help but root for her, even if you do want to sit her down and give her a stern talking-to!

The most unexpected part of this book for me was the way it dealt with classism and colonialism. Primarily these themes were explored through linguistics, and Ava’s job teaching her mother tongue in a completely different dialect from the one she speaks. While Ava is, on the whole, obnoxiously unaware of how her life bears next to no resemblance to that of the average Hong Kong citizen, she is painfully aware of how not only language but dialect is a symbol of wealth and power. Dolan manages to clearly express Ava’s complex and evolving feelings on the matter, and the intricacies at work. This made Ava’s ignorance of the other factors at play frustrating – for example, her relative wealth – but that in turn gave us more understanding of her character, and encouraged the reader to look beyond Ava’s own observations.

Exciting Times was one of the biggest surprises of the year so far for me, and I will definitely be reading Naoise Dolan’s work in the future!