A millennial Irish ex-pat who becomes involved in a romantic triangle with a male financier and a female lawyer is the subject of an intimate, bracingly clever debut novel. In search of happiness, Ava relocated to Hong Kong, but so far, things aren’t going well. Since she left Dublin, she has been avoiding her petulant roommates in her little flat during the day and teaching English to wealthy children at night. She has been given grammar classes because she lacks warmth.
An amusing British banker named Julian introduces Ava to a luxury lifestyle that her tiny income could never support. Ava moves into Julian’s flat, lets him purchase her things, and eventually develops a sexual relationship with him despite her feminist tendencies and better judgment. She stays put when Julian’s job sends him back to London, unsure of where their relationship lies.
Lawyer Edith, who was born in Hong Kong, is attractive and ambitious. She takes Ava to the theatre and leaves her tulips in the corridor. Ava desires her and wants to be her. Ava has been deftly playing the part of Julian as nothing more than an absent roommate, so when Julian says he’s going back to Hong Kong, she finds herself at a crossroads. Should she stay in her life of simple compatibility with Julian or venture into the uncharted territory with Edith?
Exciting Times is exhilaratingly attuned to the huge freedoms and bigger ambiguities of modern love. It is politically aware, heartbreakingly real, and dryly humorous. Naoise Dolan analyses the interpersonal and financial dealings that make up a life in elegant, simple words, establishing herself as a unique new voice.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“I thought that if i let anyone in, they’d find out what was broken about me. And then not only would they know, i’d know too.”
“The truth is, you like Julian because he enables this perception you have of yourself as a detached person. Plenty of people are willing to offer you intimacy. That terrifies you. You prefer feeling like no one will ever love you.”
“The trouble with my body was that I had to carry it around with me.”
“You broke up with the love of your life because you saw how much power they had to hurt you.”
“you still put more time and energy into showing you don’t love me than anyone has ever put into showing me they do.”
Such a Fun Age is a page-turning and huge narrative about race and privilege centered around a teen black babysitter, her well-intentioned boss, and a surprise connection that threatens to wreck them both. It is a striking and unexpected debut novel from an exciting new voice.
Alix Chamberlain is a confident lady who has built a successful career out of helping other women achieve their goals. She is so astonished when Emira Tucker, her babysitter, is accosted while watching the Chamberlains’ toddler one evening as she browses the aisles of their neighborhood upscale grocery store. The store’s security officer accuses Emira of abducting Briar, 2, after spotting a young black woman out later with the white child. Emira is enraged and humiliated as a small crowd forms and a spectator records everything. Alix swears to remedy the wrongs.
Alix wants to assist, but Emira is unemployed, broke, and suspicious of her. She is likely to lose her medical insurance at the age of 25, and she is unsure what she will do with her life. Both women consider themselves on a collision path that will upend all they believe about themselves and one other when the video of Emira reveals someone from Alix’s past.
Such a Fun Age examines the tenacity of transactional relationships, what it takes to be a family member, and the complex reality of growing up with empathy and biting social criticism. It is an explosive premiere for the modern era.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“I don’t need you to be mad that it happened. I need you to be mad that it just like… happens.”
“I think it best we went our separate ways, and that those paths never crossed again.”
“Alex was alone, and the one thing she still had was the freedom to follow the narrative that suited her best.”
“Emira didn’t love doing anything, but she didn’t terribly mind doing anything either.”
“I think it would be best if we went our separate ways, and that those paths never again connected.”
A 25-year-old Jamaican-British woman who lives in London, Queenie Jenkins straddles two cultures yet fits well into neither. She works for a major newspaper where she is compelled to continuously contrast herself with her white middle-class coworkers. Queenie looks for solace in all the wrong places after a difficult breakup with her long-term white partner, including a number of risky males who do a fine job of taking up mental space but a poor job of boosting self-esteem.
What are you doing? Queenie finds herself asking as she veers from one dubious choice to another. What is your motivation? What do you hope to become? —every question a woman in today’s world must ask herself in a world that tries to provide her with answers.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“The road to recovery is not linear. It’s not straight. It’s a bumpy path, with lots of twists and turns. But you’re on the right track.”
― Candice Carty-Williams, Queenie
“Is this what growing into an adult woman is—having to predict and accordingly arrange for the avoidance of sexual harassment?”
― Candice Carty-Williams, Queenie
“I wished that well-meaning white liberals would think before they said things that they thought were perfectly innocent.”
― Candice Carty-Williams, Queenie
“Being brave isn’t the same as being okay,” my mum said quietly.”
― Candice Carty-Williams, Queenie
“Turns out the sadness that silence from the person you love brings can be temporarily erased by the dull thrill of attention from strangers.”
― Candice Carty-Williams, Queenie
An internationally bestselling memoir about aging, growing up, and learning to negotiate relationships, employment, loss, and humor along the way but is also occasionally devastating. Journalist and former Sunday Times writer Dolly Alderton have experienced all of the struggles and victories of growing up. She beautifully describes how she fell in love, got a job, got drunk, got dumped, and realized that Ivan from the corner shop might be the only trustworthy man in her life and that no one will ever be able to compare her to her best girlfriend in her memoir. There are disastrous dates, amazing friends, and—most importantly—realizing that you are enough in Everything I Know About Love.
Dolly Alderton’s unforgettable debut, which sparkles with wit and insight, heart and humor, weaves together individual anecdotes, satirical observations, a series of lists, recipes, and other vignettes, will resonate with women of all ages and will make you want to call your closest friends to tell them all about it. Everything I Know About Love, like Bridget Jones’ Diary but entirely real, is about the trials of early adulthood in all its frightening and hopeful ambiguity.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Nearly everything I know about love, I’ve learned from my long-term friendships with women.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love
“Love is a quiet, reassuring, relaxing, pottering, pedantic, harmonious hum of a thing; something you can easily forget is there, even though its palms are outstretched beneath you in case you fall.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love
“When you’re looking for love and it seems like you might not ever find it, remember you probably have access to an abundance of it already, just not the romantic kind. This kind of love might not kiss you in the rain or propose marriage. But it will listen to you, inspire and restore you. It will hold you when you cry, celebrate when you’re happy, and sing All Saints with you when you’re drunk. You have so much to gain and learn from this kind of love. You can carry it with you forever. Keep it as close to you as you can.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love
“To choose to love is to take a risk”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love
“All the hours lost in the cul-de-sac of your head torturing yourself with all the stupid things you said and did, hating yourself for the following few days.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love
Nina Dean is now in her early thirties and has a new house and neighborhood in addition to adoring friends and family. She is also a popular culinary writer. It seems like everything is going according to plan when she meets Max, a seductive romantic hero who tells her on their first date that he wants to marry her.
Her thirties haven’t been the liberated, simple experience she was marketed; a new relationship couldn’t have arrived at a better time. She is always being told how quickly time is going by and how few opportunities remain. Ex-boyfriends are moving on, friendships are deteriorating, and, worst of all, everyone is relocating to the suburbs.
Her family, which includes a mother stuck in a perplexing midlife makeover and a devoted father who is slipping slowly into dementia, offers no relief. The debut book by Dolly Alderton is witty and sensitive, full of razor-sharp observations about relationships, families, memories, and modern life.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Maybe friendship is being the guardian of another person’s hope. Leave it with me and I’ll look after it for a while , if it feels too heavy for now.”
“Being a heterosexual woman who loved men meant being a translator for their emotions, a palliative nurse for their pride and a hostage negotiator for their egos.”
“So much of the love you feel for a person is dependent on the vast archive of shared memories you can access just by seeing their face or hearing their voice.”
“I hated lateness. Being late is a selfish habit adopted by boring people in search of a personality quirk who can’t be bothered to take up an instrument”
“You have to take your chance, it’s not like you fall in love with someone every week. How arrogant are you, that you think you’re going to feel like this again about someone whenever you decide you’re ready, on your terms?”
At a South East London pub, two young people meet. Both are Black Britons who received scholarships to attend exclusive institutions where they battled to fit in. They are now working as artists—she is a dancer and he is a photographer—and are attempting to leave their imprint in a community that alternately accepts and rejects them. They fall in love tentatively and tenderly. But even when two people appear to be meant to be together, fear and violence have the power to separate them.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“You have always thought if you opened your mouth in open water you would drown, but if you didn’t open your mouth you would suffocate. So here you are, drowning.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water
“What you’re trying to say is that it’s easier for you to hide in your own darkness than emerge cloaked in your own vulnerability. Not better, but easier. However the longer you hold it in, the more likely you are to suffocate.
At some point, you must breathe.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water
“Every time you remember something, the memory weakens, as you’re remembering the last recollection, rather than the memory itself. Nothing can remain intact. Still, it does not stop you want, does not stop you longing.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water
“What is better than believing you are heading towards love?”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water
“You ache. You ache all over. You are aching to be you, but you’re scared of what it means to do so.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water
In a brand-new home outside of Boston, Massachusetts, Hen and her husband Lloyd have become used to living quietly. Illustrator Hen (also known as Henrietta) works out of a nearby studio and has found the correct medications to manage her bipolar disorder. She had, at last, discovered some security and tranquility.
She notices a familiar item on the husband’s office shelf, which makes her uneasy when they meet the neighbors down the street. The sporting trophy resembles one that vanished from the residence of a young guy who was killed two years ago exactly. Hen is aware of this since she has long been fascinated by the unsolved murder—an passion she no longer discusses but also can’t seem to shake.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Matthew, who’d already texted Mira to tell her he was running a little late, leaned back behind his desk and did one of the things he was very good at doing. He listened to a woman.”
“It was a habit of Hen’s, and not one she was proud of, that she was often interested only in people who’d suffered in some way.”
“I am a happy person, always have been. But that’s just my personality, which has nothing to do with this broken brain that periodically and very convincingly”
“I am a happy person, always have been. But that’s just my personality, which has nothing to do with this broken brain that periodically and very convincingly tells me that I’m a worthless person who doesn’t deserve to live.”
“If you gave a man just the smallest amount of power—a handsome face, the ability to sing, a little money—the first thing he’d do is destroy a woman, or two if he could.”
The fifteen-year marriage of a couple has now become too interesting… Our love tale is straightforward. I met a stunning lady. We experienced love. We had children. We relocated to a suburb. We shared our deepest secrets and our loftiest aspirations with one another. We eventually became bored. We appear to be a typical couple. We are your neighbors, the guardians of your child’s playmate, and the friends you definitely plan to invite to dinner. Each of us has a method for preserving a marriage. It just so happens that ours has gotten away with murder.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“But I keep my mouth shut, because that’s what friends do. We don’t point out each other’s faults unless asked.”
“My feelings about this are conflicted. I want my kids to feel safe. I also want them to know how dangerous the world is.”
“The doctor called after hearing about Jane Doe, saying he wanted an extra session. He is afraid this new attack will make Jenna regress. I am not sure she has progressed enough to regress, but I take her anyway.”
“I laugh and rub her leg. It is slung over mine in that lazy way. “The kids might think it’s weird.”
“Sometimes it’s just easier to go along with things. It’s easier than breaking it all up and starting from scratch.”