“This novel is a tour-de-force work about exile and the world of expats in Hong Kong. Seeking accommodation, looking for love, teaching English as a foreign language, dealing with foreigners, being Irish, calling home, are all dramatized with wit and emotional accuracy and a refusal to settle for easy narrative solutions.” Colm Tóibín, Laureate for Irish Fiction 2022-2024.

Naoise Dolan is an Irish writer born in Dublin. She studied at Trinity College, followed by a Master’s in Victorian literature at Oxford. She writes fiction, essays, criticism and features for publications including The London Review of Books, The Guardian and Vogue. Naoise’s debut novel Exciting Times was published by W&N in the UK and by Ecco in the US in 2020, and became a Sunday Times bestseller, widely translated and optioned for TV. She has been shortlisted and longlisted for several prizes, including The Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize and The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Exciting Times was shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards and the Waterstones Book of the Year in 2020. Her second novel is forthcoming. Photo credit:  Maria Bianchi