Bellies: ‘A beautiful love story’ Irish Times

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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 I really fell in love with the characters of Ming and Tom. It has heartbreaking parts but ones that make you smile with joy too. I hope we hear more from Nicola Dinan in the future. Nicola Dinan: There’s something strange about how, when you’re publishing a book, you have to actively position yourself in relation to other authors – ‘for fans of … ’ – when I think the ways we’re influenced by other writers, and in conversation with other writers, are often so much more subtle and indirect. Some of the biggest influences on my writing have been writers like Rachel Cusk or James Baldwin, and I’m not sure you would even see that in the way that I write. My prose style is so different to Rachel Cusk’s, but you can feel that influence in the way that dialogue is approached, for instance. A novel overspilling with care and affection for its characters.... The hype for her book is high i-D magazine It’s a condition of society now in that we just grow up a bit later and in a lot of ways the ways our bodies grow outpace our minds. We look like adults but we don't necessarily feel like them. And that's an interesting analogy to transness right? In the sense that people are looking at you and seeing one thing, but your internal experience of what you are feels different. That dissonance can cause a lot of distress in people across the board.

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.

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It’s been a while since a book has moved me as Bellies has. It has the unwavering honesty of Sally Rooney’s Normal People (I know so many people compare novels to Sally Rooney’s, but this time it’s for real) and the heartache of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, yet it shines as a unique and profound novel in its own right. Bellies centres on Ming’s transition and life as a woman, but it’s also the story of how Tom grows up and becomes a man. It’s a story about love and heartbreak, but also the possibilities of queer friendship. Its characters talk and worry about their bodies, drugs, health, art and responsibility, but ultimately they are most concerned with how to care for the people who know them most intimately.” Until it isn’t. After a while, Ming starts being distant from Tom and reveals that he is considering transitioning. Suddenly, the novel turns from boy-meets-boy romance to something much more interesting. Traversing the pitfalls of the gender transition novel, Dinan, who herself is trans, deftly weaves a compelling and compassionate narrative that feels totally unique in this year’s literary calendar. Written by Nicola Dinan, who grew up in Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur and studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge University before training as a lawyer, Bellies is a captivating read, heady with the whirlwind feelings of early-twenties post-university life: it’s sensual, witty, nostalgic and captures the dizzying feeling that the world has both massively expanded and become scarier, less warm. But the novel is underpinned by both a sharp, piercing intelligence and a boundless sense of compassion. Everyone hurts other people, particularly when they are young and selfish and scared, and yet most people are trying their best; they can grow, repair, do better. Beyond just being a love story, Bellies is a relationships story, unsparing yet optimistic about our abilities to understand each other, connect to each other and heal. EC: The book has two POV characters; it’s quite rare that a book’s empathy and focus is so evenly shared between two characters even though they’re so different. It would have been very easy for the book to devote more empathic resources to one character than the other, but it stays very balanced.

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. 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? It’s also hard to conceive of what audience I would’ve written for. Sure, the girls, the gays and the theys, but even that demands a reductive approach to a group with really distinct reading habits. Audiences can also surprise you. I wouldn’t want to limit myself from the get-go. Bellies has done quite well with a lot of boomers. Who knew? 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. At its best, Bellies is as deep as it is chic, propelled by the good intentions dropped between different wavelengths, a sensitive study of the challenge of moving past judgment towards perception.

Bryan Moriarty

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

EC: Given that focus on potential legacy, what would you most like readers to take away from reading Bellies ? 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. There's no real drama. The story is simply told but gives a lot of insight into the kinds of compromises and decisions that need to be made when a person decides to become someone else - the someone they are happier being. With this being your first novel, did you have an audience in mind when writing it, or were you writing for yourself? Triumphant and humane, Nicola Dinan's Bellies gently turns over that essential question: What are we willing to sacrifice to know ourselves? Elle, A Most Anticipated Book of 2023

ND: It would have been easier to devote those resources to Ming, for sure. What’s interesting is that I think some would expect a book which has transitioning at its centre to entirely focus on the trans character, but while transitioning is an essential plotline of the novel, more than anything it’s a novel about relationships, love, how love transforms from one thing to another. Part of why I wanted to include Tom’s voice as well is to centre the relational aspect of the change that’s going on in Ming’s life; suddenly something that feels so obscure and specific to so many people, transitioning, becomes a little more universal. It becomes this thing that could be akin to a geographical move, or a bereavement, all these things that happen in our relationships that change how we relate to one another, and can, potentially, pull us apart. Jury Head Baz Luhrmann on Attending Red Sea Film Fest Amid Regional Conflict: "Voices of Storytellers Need to Get Out There" EC: It felt very specifically late 2010s – I started transitioning a little while after Ming does in the novel, and it feels like if she’d started three years earlier or three years later, her experience would have been very different. In terms of writing a book that lasts with someone, when I think of the books that have lasted with me, it's the ones that have me asking questions, or questioning the ethics and morality of decisions that the characters have made. 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