Bellies: ‘A beautiful love story’ Irish Times

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I didn’t think too much about a target market or anything when I was writing the book, but I always had a reader in mind, and I tried to tell the story the way I’d share an anecdote or a piece of gossip with a friend; sharp, clear and funny. It begins as your typical boy meets boy. While out with friends at their local university drag night, Tom buys Ming a drink. And finally, one of the things I loved most was how you afford Ming and Tom a lot of room for growth. It’s a very candid novel in that sense, particularly with how fallible but also relatable both characters felt. Within fiction, I think there’s sometimes an impulse to paint marginalised characters as virtuous or perfect, and I loved how you went against that impulse. Could you talk about your intentions with that? A beautiful book. Thoroughly enjoyed it even if it did make me cry several times (I'm very emotional). After graduating, the pair move in with Tom’s parents in south London. Contrary to his lefty politics, Tom launches a career in finance. He struggles to sync his desires with Ming’s increasingly feminised body – which he describes as “strong-armed into a kind of anti-pubescence”. As Ming better sees herself as a trans woman, she emerges from the image that Tom still carries with him.

EC: You’re currently adapting Bellies for the screen; the atmosphere of the book feels so distinct that I found myself wondering, was there any music you’d want to use in a TV adaptation, or that you think would be good to listen to while reading it? A novel overspilling with care and affection for its characters.... The hype for her book is high i-D magazine 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.

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

Bellies is a breathtakingly vivid, unflinching work that feels deeply honest. Reading it, I was so powerfully reminded of what it is to be young and to find one's way in a difficult world. Tender and warm, Bellies is a testament to the courage it takes to be vulnerable. Okechukwu Nzelu, author of The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney 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 Although dealing intimately with love, Dinan does not characterise the novel explicitly as a love story. She says: “I suppose it is a love story, but in a lot of ways it’s a subversion… It subverts the tropes of a love story in that Ming’s journey creates this fundamental incompatibility between Tom and Ming. So these two characters are left to negotiate what love actually is. That is the story: two characters negotiating what love can be between two people when other things are in the way.” 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 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 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

The most fantastic consequence of that, however, is all the messages I’ve had from people telling me how seen they felt in the novel, and not just readers from the east and south east Asian community it depicts, but anyone who has struggled to move to a new culture and felt displaced and in limbo. Knowing I’ve written something specific and yet universal is genuinely the highest praise I could have hoped for, especially as growing up I never really saw myself represented in the mainstream fiction space and this was always something I longed for. A youthful and urgent look at relationships, family, gender expression, intimacy and trust. Mendez, author of Rainbow Milk The inspiration came from a friend telling me about two people he knew in an open relationship, one of whom was delighted with their way of life, while the other was fed up and longing to be exclusive. A year or so later, I was sketching out some ideas for a romantic comedy, and I felt like the story of one side of an open relationship had lots of potential for humour and a dose of drama. I haven't felt so seen by a book in a long time. Neither have I cried like that at one. Bellies broke me apart in the best way possible. Dinan is a huge talent and I'll read everything she writes. Annie Lord, Vogue columnist and author of Notes on Heartbreak

While the central metaphor of vulnerability and intimacy is paramount, I could not help but notice how much of the title also derives from Dinan's exploration of hunger. Hunger for identity and a positive self-concept, yes, but also the literal hunger that influences it: Bellies is full of descriptions of food, and it also goes into detail into the relationships its various characters have with it, whether in terms of physical body image or a sense of cultural identity. All that food, particularly Malaysian food, is a necessary inclusion in the novel that very subtly illuminates Ming's experience as a trans woman of colour. While her perspective is presented to readers in fewer chapters compared to Tom, her character can be understood more fully through the ways in which her native cuisine is presented to us: it is a link, for her, between her past and a present in which she is more at home with herself but is also unable to go home to a place where her very existence is illegal. How does it feel to send something you’ve put so much time and creative endeavour into, out into the wider world? A fresh and compelling literary romance that hopefully signposts exactly where the much-saturated genre is heading in the future Big Issue It’s been really lovely writing Disappoint Me feeling free of the additional challenges of a published first novel already. Even with Bellies being at a pre-publication stage, there’s already so much pressure of a second book not being able to live up to the feeling of the first. I can only imagine how much harder that would have been of I’d waited. Ming is worldly compared with Tom, whose biographical highlights include being there when Shia LaBeouf headbutted someone in a south-east London pub. The two fizz with first love, surrounded by friends including Tom’s cuddly straight pal Rob and ex-girlfriend Sarah, who has also recently come out, with “a monkish new wisdom about all things queer, but none of the monastic silence”. Conversations are studenty: Sarah is annoyed that Rob isn’t familiar with the concept of “comphet”, or compulsory heterosexuality; Ming hasn’t figured out why Hegel needs “a socialist defence”; and is it a bad idea to “drop” during your DJ set?

I decided I wanted to write something in honour of both her and all the other hidden women from that time who contributed so much to the UK, even as they were derided for their differences. It was a tribute, more than anything; a love letter to thank her for all the opportunities and cultural richness she had given to me as a woman of diverse heritage. It was only as I started writing that I realised how much our respective journeys converged in terms of identity and that search for belonging which led to the idea of telling the stories of a mother and daughter in tandem. With a TV adaptation in the works, Nicola Dinan discusses her vivid, intimate début novel, Bellies. A coming-of-age story about falling in and out of love, brimming with humour and heartbreak, Bellies asks: is it worth losing a part of yourself to become who you are?This was an incredibly moving, humane story; unflinchingly honest in its portrayal of the complexities of evolving into one's own person and navigating queer relationships in the modern age. Tom and Ming are, on one level, undergoing the same journey in different directions: one has spent years coming to terms with his sexuality as a gay man only to find himself in love with a woman; the other has navigated years of living as a gay man before accepting herself as a straight woman. Bellies does a brilliant job of exploring their growing pains and their perspectives in a work that is as gentle as it is incisive. Dinan's characters, whether the protagonists, their families, or their friend circles, are each fleshed out to be real and multidimensional, drawn with a degree of compassion and understanding that I have never before encountered in contemporary literature, and that endeared me to them in ways that even TV shows with a 10+ season run haven't quite been able to: they are all people as we are, flawed even in their goodness, and capable of selfish and devastatingly hurtful acts even as they deeply care for one another. The drama between them is too the drama of life, with all its attendant changes, its pushes and pulls, its delicious foods, sights, sounds, and smells, its moments of loneliness, longing, and confusion, and the variegated challenges it throws at us as individuals. All of it is simply told, through natural dialogue and various poetic asymmetries, but is gripping and immensely resonant.