Ava lands in Hong Kong from Dublin with a teaching job and a talent for noticing exactly what everyone around her is worth. Her days go on English grammar with the children of rich families. Her evenings go on Julian, an English banker who likes buying her things and explaining currency movements, and who answers the question of whether he loves her with the news that he likes her a great deal.

Julian's job pulls him back to London. Ava stays on in his apartment, unsure what she is to him, and meets Edith, a Hong Kong-born lawyer who takes her to the theatre and leaves tulips in the hallway. Wanting to be Edith and wanting Edith prove hard to separate.

Naoise Dolan's debut, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in April 2020, keeps money and feeling in the same ledger: who pays, who owes, who can afford to be honest. Ava narrates in short, clean, funny sentences, and the comedy works as armour long before she admits it. Class runs under all of it, an Irish woman in a former British colony, teaching the accent of people richer than she will ever be. Good for readers who want a love triangle handled with irony rather than swoon, and who enjoy a narrator whose cleverness keeps deserting her at the worst possible moment.