Nicola Dinan

"TRIUMPHANT AND HUMANE." --Elle, A Most Anticipated Book of 2023 I wore a dress on the night I first met Ming. It begins as your typical boy meets boy. While out with friends at their local university drag night, Tom buys Ming a drink. Confident and witty, a magnetic young playwright, Ming is the perfect antidote to Tom's awkward energy, and their connection is instant. Tom finds himself deeply and desperately drawn into Ming's orbit, and on the cusp of graduation, he's already mapped out their future together. But shortly after they move to London to start their next chapter, Ming announces her intention to transition. From London to Kuala Lumpur, New York to Cologne, we follow Tom and Ming as they face tectonic shifts in their relationship and friend circle in the wake of Ming's transition. Through a spiral of unforeseen crises--some personal, some professional, some life-altering--Tom and Ming are forced to confront the vastly different shapes their lives have taken since graduating, and each must answer the essential question: Is it worth losing a part of yourself to become who you are? Buoyed by a voice as tender, effervescent and wryly funny as the cast of characters it centers, Bellies is an unforgettable story of youth, intimacy, hunger and heartbreak, at once boldly original yet fiercely familiar, which unabashedly holds a mirror up to our most vulnerable selves and desires.

A Novel

Bellies

An electrifying story of love, betrayal, and the complicated allure of bougie domesticity from award-nominated author Nicola Dinan

“Dinan writes like some kind of demigod. Her fictions make thinkable new realities for how we live and what we might expect from each other. "
– Torrey Peters, author of Detransition Baby

I don’t know why I feel like I’ve been caught doing something dirty. Cheating on queerness. Fell down the stairs and woke up a trad wife.

Thirty years old with a lifetime of dysphoria and fuccbois rattling around in her head, Max is plagued by a deep dissatisfaction. Shouldn't these be the best years of her life? Why doesn't it feel that way? After taking a spill down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party, she decides to make some changes. First: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity.

Max thinks she’s found the answer in Vincent. While his corporate colleagues, trad friends, and Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman, he cares for Max in a way she’d always dismissed as a foolish fantasy. But he is also carrying baggage of his own. When the fall-out of a decades-old entanglement resurfaces, Max must decide what forgiveness really means. Can we be more than our worst mistakes? Is it possible to make peace with the past? 

Funny, sharp, and poignant, Disappoint Me is a sweeping exploration of love, loss, trans panic, race, millennial angst, and the relationships--familial and romantic--that make us who we are. 

Disappoint Me 

“One of the sharpest and most emotionally vulnerable novels on the complicated dynamic of dating cisgender straight men as a trans woman.”—Autostraddle (7 New Trans Novels to Read this Summer) “Dinan writes like some kind of demigod. Her fictions make thinkable new realities for how we live and what we might expect from each other.”—Torrey Peters, bestselling author of Detransition, Baby ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR (SO FAR): Elle, Vogue, BookRiot You can fall in love with an outline, you can even make a home with one, but there will come a time where you can’t deny the bones their flesh. A person is no fewer than two things. Thirty years old with a lifetime of dysphoria and irritating exes rattling around in her head, Max is plagued by a deep dissatisfaction. Shouldn't these be the best years of her life? Why doesn't it feel that way? After taking a spill down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party, she decides to make some changes. First: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity. Max thinks she’s found the answer in Vincent. While his corporate colleagues, trad friends, and Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman, he cares for Max in a way she’d always dismissed as a foolish fantasy. But he is also carrying baggage of his own. When the fall-out of a decades-old entanglement resurfaces, Max must decide what forgiveness really means. Can we be more than our worst mistakes? Is it possible to make peace with the past? Funny, sharp, and poignant, Disappoint Me is a sweeping exploration of love, loss, trans panic, race, millennial angst, and the relationships—familial and romantic—that make us who we are.

Nicola Dinan

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