This is a lovely debut; eager, youthful, authentic and with an optimistic heart beat even in its darkest moments Pandora Sykes 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. 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. 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. Dinan grew up in Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur and now lives in London. She studied at Cambridge and trained as a lawyer before turning to writing. Bellies tells the story of Tom and Ming in alternating chapters and skips over periods of time, much like Sally Rooney did with Connell and Marianne in Normal People. (Element Pictures , who adapted Normal People , have also secured the rights to Bellies.) After a few difficult and anxious months, Ming tells Tom that she wants to transition and the book’s core dilemmas emerge – what is love that alters when it alteration finds? Does our partner’s gender change how we feel about them? Is sexuality fluid or rigid? This is as complex a love story as it gets and it is delicately and movingly handled by Dinan as she explores the essential questions of love and identity.

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 beautiful book. Thoroughly enjoyed it even if it did make me cry several times (I'm very emotional).

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

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. I feel like everyone in their early 20s expects themselves to be an adult, in so many different ways, but I’m not sure you actually count as one? As I said, Ghost Girl, Banana was really written in tribute to my mum and so from the start I was very much focussed on doing her story and her experiences justice, albeit through fiction. I think this also helped me write with a sense of nothing to lose, which is the unique gift of a debut author. There was no expectation there and therefore no cynicism to the process!

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? You have to externalise so much of the novel which is internal, sometimes that’s through facial expressions and sometimes that’s through movement. But ultimately, there’s only so much you can do.Bobby Mostyn-Owen, commissioning editor, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, to Bellies from Monica MacSwan at Aitken Alexander. A publication date has not yet been set. 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 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. 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

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. Firstly, Ming’s transition is bankrolled. She saves money because she and Tom move into Tom’s parents’ house in London after graduation. She also has an inheritance, as well as a well-off dad. She flies over the hurdles many trans people face: she has enough money for surgical intervention, and doesn’t have to bother with inhumanely long waiting times for HRT on the NHS. As a writer, it was refreshing to write queer experiences not mired by structural hurdles, choosing instead to focus on relationship dynamics existing outside of those challenges. I wanted to show that even when you’re holding a royal flush, big changes are hard to make, and new lives are hard to adjust to. In doing so, I think Bellies makes an experience as specific as transitioning feel a little bit more universal. On the other hand, those systemic barriers are the cruel reality for most trans people today. 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. You know an animal trusts you when it shows you its belly — the softest, most vulnerable part of the body, kept hidden as an almost instinctive act of protection. Between people, too, being vulnerable and opening up to others with our hopes, insecurities, and fears is the greatest act of confidence. Nicola Dinan's gorgeous, masterful debut novel is built around the shape of the connections that make space for such exposure; the acts of friendship and intimacy that allow us to show people our bellies.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

A lot of people approach writing thinking: “Okay, well, I have to have this short story published in this journal”, although I don’t think that’s a very helpful mindset to have. And doing the Faber course gave me the confidence to finish the novel.I read your interview with Torrey Peters for Detransition, Baby and I was proper laughing at the bit where you were saying your mate was like "I don't want cis people to read this because they'll know too much!" I was curious how that maybe could apply to Bellies. Do you think people will take different things away from it based on their gender identity?