With Julian away, the women bond and Ava must interrogate herself over a whole new range of feelings. “It was as if someone else ironed everything for her – her whole life,” Ava thinks, “and her role was to make new creases.” Dolan is also funny about Irishness, pointing out the irony of Ava having to teach her young ESL students how to aspirate the “th” in “things” when, as a Dubliner, she has gone 22 years without once pronouncing it herself.Īn entire novel in this vein might become wearing, but Dolan takes her narrative to a new level when she brings in a character Ava actually likes: Edith, a local who went to boarding school in England. Figures such as Victoria serve to generate much of the book’s caustic wit. Emotions are dealt with baldly, dryly: “Anyway, I hated her,” says Ava about Victoria, a moneyed friend of Julian’s. Like Rooney, Dolan writes in a deadpan style. This model of relationship-as-power-struggle is hardly new, but Dolan brings a fresh 21st-century sensibility to it Ava is constantly trying to make sense of her situation by framing it in terms of identity: does sleeping with Julian make her a bad feminist? Or a good girlfriend? In this, she’s reminiscent of Sally Rooney’s precarious young women, whose struggle for self-affirmation is so snarled up with the power dynamics of sex. Though this model of relationship-as-power-struggle is hardly new, Dolan brings a fresh 21st-century sensibility to it. Ava makes it her mission to get him to admit some feelings for her, purely because it would give her the upper hand. His privilege is the invisible third party in the relationship. Julian, her posh banker boyfriend, has such an apartment – which is just as well, since he also has an arrogance to match his salary.

It’s a brilliantly concise summation of her take on relationships, which she sees as a power game, an “ultimately shallow emotional transaction” in which the greatest potential benefit might be that you get to move into an apartment better than anything you can afford on your own.

A va, a 22-year-old Dubliner living in Hong Kong, describes herself as “good at men”.

Naoise dolan new book