I adored the school sections of the novel – possibly because as an English teacher with a reputation of a grammar expert, comments likeīecause I lacked warmth, I was mainly assigned grammar classes, where children not liking you was a positive performance indicator. I loved her ruminations on sex, gender, class and politics – she was so sharp and on point, even as she told us how bad she was.ĭolan’s writing is, in fact, an absolute treasure trove of aphorisms. Despite both Julian and Edith finding out about each other, both are generally grown up and decent about the situation. There is little in the way of plot or tension or conflict outside of that: she falls into a relationship of sorts with the English banker Julian when he is back in England for a period of months, she falls into a relationship with Edith Zhang Mei Ling. If you don’t get on with Ava, you won’t get on with this book: there is nothing in it save for Ava. She, in her own opinion “wasn’t good at most things but I was good at men”. She is self-deprecating, caustic and witty. And then not only would they know, I’d know too.”Īva is a twenty-two year-old ex pat from Dublin, living in Hong Kong in a grubby Airbnb and teaching English as a Foreign Language to eight year olds in a school that does not allow her to urinate between classes. Gay bookshops and specific LGBT sections are valuable, too, because LGBT people can and should explicitly celebrate our identities but we’re everywhere in society, so it’s about time we were everywhere in bookshops.“I thought that if i let anyone in, they’d find out what was broken about me. It was the sort of book that might have been banned within Ireland not long ago, and it was not only there on the general fiction shelf, but able to attract me based on my interests outside sexuality. (Sometimes people say that it was ‘modern’ of me to write my debut novel about a bisexual love triangle. Same-sex relationships weren’t intrinsically shocking to me, and they weren’t spoken about openly enough at home or at school for me to know what other people thought. I can’t remember having any particular reaction to that. The blurb said that the novel centred on a love triangle between a woman, a man, and another woman. I was obsessed with old books and history, so the cover image of a woman in an elegant Georgian dress drew me in. It was there in general fiction under ‘D’ not prominently displayed, as it had been published a few years back, but promisingly bulky. I was fourteen or so, and I found it in Dubray’s Rathmines branch. The first gay book I remember reading was Life Mask by Emma Donoghue.

Naoise dolan books