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Bellies: ‘A beautiful love story’ Irish Times

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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. Dinan grew up in Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur, and now calls London home. Bellies is her first novel, for which she was shortlisted for the Mo Siewcharran Prize. She is a graduate of the Faber Academy Writing A Novel course. I wrote Bellies for myself, but I’m a reader as much as I am a writer, and so I knew I probably wasn’t alone in my tastes! Writing entirely for other people would've been challenging. It would’ve impeded the development of an authentic or distinctive voice – for me, at least. I also left Bellies knowing it was the novel I wanted to write and would like to read, which has made the idea of criticism much easier to swallow. The way Dinan writes about love, loss, growing up, transitioning and our bodies took my breath away. I can't wait for this novel to be published, so I can talk about it with everyone I know. Travis Alabanza, Guardian

Eli Cugini: So, you’re a debut author in your late twenties, writing about university and post-university students in their early twenties, and their attendant heartbreaks, griefs, interpersonal affections, cruelties. Bellies is already drawing the expected comparisons to the work of Sally Rooney, Brandon Taylor, and others. Who are your main influences? It’s exciting. Writing can be so private. Having a book in shops makes my career as a novelist feel much more material. The book tour was so rewarding, it was the first time I was able to talk about the book in a way that extended beyond small talk at dinner parties, and it took me as far as Tbilisi. At the same time, I worry a lot. The book is a project close to my heart, but as a result of its release it's transformed into a product. I can’t help but fret over whether people are buying it, reading it, burning it.

Nicola Dinan

Nicola Dinan’s debut novel Bellies begins on familiar terrain – a group of college students at the union bar, the beginnings of attraction between two students, Tom and Ming – but as Dinan closely follows their relationship, the book shifts from the kind of generic story you think it’s going to be, to the kind of story that becomes a lasting favourite with unforgettable characters. I finished this book and wanted to tell everyone I met to read it. Quietly heartbreaking whilst tremendously sharp and funny. I couldn't stop reading. Travis Alabanza, author of None Of The Above Bellies by Nicola Dinan is a beautifully bittersweet depiction of the seismic changes of early adulthood with unforgettably funny, spiky, believable main characters. Leon Craig, author of Parallel Hells Bellies, this glorious debut about the beautiful discomfort of being seen and known, hooked me from the very start. Nicola Dinan's prose is swift and immersive and the empathy with which she writes her characters' foibles, flaws, and faulty perceptions is boundless. Both tender and biting, Bellies has captured my whole heart. Ilana Masad, author of All My Mother’s Lovers A brilliantly tender depiction of male friendship at its best, and food descriptions so rich they'll leave you holding the book in one hand and looking up recipes with the other GQ Magazine

A youthful and urgent look at relationships, family, gender expression, intimacy and trust. Mendez, author of Rainbow Milk That's what's so nice about having an ensemble cast is that you don't feel limited thematically to a particular group of people or a particular community. There's room to expand to speak to something broader. It is definitely a second adolescence. The synopsis says: “It begins as your typical boy meets boy. At a drag night in a university town, Tom meets Ming. Ming is what Tom wants and wants to be: a promising young playwright; confident and witty and a perfect antidote to Tom’s awkward energy. They fall hard for each other, but when Ming announces her decision to transition, the pair must confront that love may not be enough. This begins as a boy-meets-boy love story, but when the couple leaves university to go to London, one goes through the process of transitioning and the story is about what happens to their relationship from that. It's a really beautiful, underrepresented love story in fiction. i, Debuts To Keep An Eye On In 2023 Confident and witty, a charming 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.

Bryan Moriarty

Gloriously queer . . . This novel is funny, smart, deeply nuanced, and full of characters who are fully human . . . It's one of the most poignant stories about queer and trans young adulthood I've read in ages BookRiot

Filled with warmth and heart, Bellies is a tender, beautiful and heartbreaking exploration of identity, growing up, and love in all its glorious forms. I can't wait to see what Nicola Dinan does next. Cecile Pin, author of Wandering Souls As a trans woman, Dinan has her own experience of transitioning. In Bellies, she was keen to look at something “which is seen as so personal” from the perspective of someone one step removed. “I was interested in what it meant to be on the outside of someone else’s experience—and an experience that is deeply personal to them, like someone’s transness.” It was also important to her to offer a more pluralised view of queer and trans identities which, at times in fiction, can be relatively one-note. “[Ming] does things and you think, ‘Oh my God, you’re awful’ or, ‘You’re being awful in this moment’. But at the same time, just like the rest of us she is allowed to be...” Elaborating, she says: “There’s an impetus to create this virtuous image of a trans person who can do no wrong. I find that very limiting…I want trans people to have the freedom to be a bit shit too.” Instead she advocates for fully fleshed-out, authentic, multitudinous representation. “If we truly want to aim for fiction being an effective way to raise empathy for disenfranchised and marginalised communities, we have to write characters that are fallible. It’s not actually helpful to the cause to have these perfect characters, because when you create a solely virtuous narrative around a group of people, people look for ways to prove that wrong.” Picture this When I began Ghost Girl, Banana , it really wasn’t with the intention of writing a novel. I was still going through the quite traumatic loss of my mum and my sister and was in the throes of moving from London to Scotland when I discovered a box of my mum’s possessions, at the bottom of which was a series of floppy discs simply labelled ‘my story’. These turned out to be her diaries, a remarkably uncensored account of her life that she’d been keeping since her immigration to the UK in the early 1960s as part of the recruitment drive for the NHS. She had always been remarkably stoic about her experiences as a Chinese woman thrown into this very different culture and so reading the diaries was a bit of an epiphany, allowing me to feel I finally understood who my mum had been. Moving from London to Kuala Lumpur, New York to Cologne, Bellies follows two queer students, Tom and Ming, who fall in love at university and find their relationship dramatically upended when Ming comes out as trans and decides to transition. What has always fascinated me about London is that for such a densely populated place, with such a varied demographic, we still exist here more as subsets than a collective community. There’s still a lot of tribalism in London, whether that’s the territorialism of the north/south river divide, or the us versus them mentality of wealth and/or diaspora which provides real grist for a writer.

With a TV adaptation in the works, Nicola Dinan discusses her vivid, intimate début novel, Bellies. With Bellies Nicola Dinan has written an intimate odyssey - full of warmth and humour... Offering a story about connection, loneliness, identity, and the many different forms that family can take. Thoughtful, seductive, and entirely engrossing - Bellies is already a classic. Bryan Washington, author of Lot and Memorial

We were immediately absorbed and transported by the love story between Tom and Ming — and by Nicola’s writing, which is in equal parts hilarious and heart-breaking,” said Element Pictures’ Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe and Chelsea Morgan Hoffmann, who will executive produce alongside Dinan. “We think the world is hungry for a love story like theirs — that authentically allows for the space and complexity of their changing dynamic, both as Ming transitions but also as the two of them grow into adulthood — while still honoring the excitement and intensity of first love. We are delighted to bring their story to the screen and couldn’t be happier that Nicola is adapting herself.” The best love stories are the ones in which the characters' perceptions of themselves and each other change in surprising ways. Bellies is a grand, affecting story of shifting identities and shifting intimacy. Electric Literature, A Most Anticipated Book of 2023 On a trip to Malaysia, where Ming’s mother died – and “it’s not so hot for the gays”, reports Ming – the couple eat kuih seri muka and yong tau foo. Dinan summons different locations with supple grace. (“Places move into people just as much as people move into places,” she writes.) She is also deft at depicting intimacy. Tom and Ming listen to each other’s bellies gurgle, watch Britney Spears’s snake dance on a laptop and practise Meisner technique, a theatre exercise of closely observing a partner’s actions. My debut novel, Bellies, has two protagonists. There’s Tom, a white, middle-class Mark Fisher-and-techno-loving boy from south London (sorry). And then there’s Ming, an exuberant playwright from Malaysia who suffers from OCD. They fall in love at university – seemingly as two gay men – but after moving to London following graduation, Ming comes out as trans.

Nicola Dinan's powerful and vulnerable debut Bellies marks a watershed moment in British trans fiction

A fresh and compelling literary romance that hopefully signposts exactly where the much-saturated genre is heading in the future Big Issue

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