Book cover of Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan

Disappoint-Me-website-banner-2-1024×683

Extracts

Extract: Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan

Bellies

At its best, Bellies is as deep as it is chic

The most hotly anticipated novel of the summer

A tender, emotional exploration of gender and sexual identity

Beautiful depiction of derailed love

A poignant tale that explores the messy complexities of relationships, with recognisably imperfect characters at its core

A vividly drawn cast of supporting characters enhances this absorbing and carefully balanced novel - narrated from both Tom and Ming's perspectives - which manages to be both deeply touching and wickedly witty.

Dinan's gift as a writer is her ability to make us feel - when her characters cry, we cry; when they laugh, we laugh; and everybody is changed by the end of this novel, including the reader. A beautiful love story and an exceptional debut.

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.

A novel overspilling with care and affection for its characters.... The hype for her book is high

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.

Triumphant and humane, Nicola Dinan's Bellies gently turns over that essential question: What are we willing to sacrifice to know ourselves?

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

Smart, hilarious and deeply moving

This is a lovely debut; eager, youthful, authentic and with an optimistic heart beat even in its darkest moments

Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby

A delicious, page turning Summer read and debut from novelist Nicola Dinan. It unpacks so many complicated nuances of being queer and in your twenties. Romantic, sexy, vulnerable. First romance centring a transfemme I've read and loved published on a larger scale.

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

A youthful and urgent look at relationships, family, gender expression, intimacy and trust.

Bellies is fun, clever, and very good

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

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

In this dryly comedic, richly drawn portrait of friends and lovers in early adulthood, Nicola Dinan charts the complexities, contradictions, and joys of human entanglement, and reminds us of the inevitability of being changed by those we love. Bellies is a book that not only explores transformation, but transforms the reader, too. I loved this powerful, mortal, moving debut.

Bellies is an engrossing, perceptive novel of the now, charged with the nail-biting hesitancy and giddy exuberance of youth, transition and myriad kinds of love. Bellies announces Nicola Dinan as a genuine literary talent, a gimlet-eyed cartographer of the human heart. I'm a huge fan and I'll read anything she writes.

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

With Bellies, Nicola Dinan has written an exquisite portrayal of relationships, of our need for connection in this modern world, and of what we owe to one another. Sumptuously written, it reaches through the darkness of our fears to remind us that the only way to be seen is to ask. With Bellies, her debut, Nicola Dinan foregrounds herself as a bright literary talent, one whose next work I await with little patience.

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.

A luminous depiction of what it's like to love someone for their very soul. Nicola is a beautiful, beautiful writer.

Ore Agbaje-Williams, author of The Three of Us

In growing up, we each have to gain a sense of the world. In these absolutely glowing pages, Tom and Ming make their way. They love and dream in ways that only youth can, but perhaps we all should. Dinan imbues this tale of identity and friendship with generosity, hope and that mighty keen touch of wit.

Bellies is a sumptuous, powerful novel, about the self, about food, about relationships but ultimately about finding yourself in a complicated world.

Nikesh Shukla, author of The Good Immigrant

Reflecting the nuances and realities of real love is what I was trying to achieve in my own novel, and I admire her ability to capture a single moment and make it so electric and alive. She's a very, very talented writer

Both incisive and propulsive. With intimacy and intelligence, this excellent debut asks important questions about how we try, and fail, to transmute our ideology into empathy, about the responsibilities we owe to one another.

Susannah Dickey, author of Tennis Lessons

Dinan's prose is heartfelt and endlessly readable. She explores her characters with sympathy and patience, never casting villains, only complicated humans who are trying their best. It is an earnest and honest exploration of identity and connection that is sure to resonate.

Reader’s Digest '5 Debut Books to Look Out For 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.

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

A beautiful work of literature with fully realized, highly empathic characters; [Dinan's] treatment of Ming's transition is superbly and insightfully handled. An important contribution to the slender body of transgender literature.

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

A beautiful and moving story about trauma and love that will leave you satisfied at the end

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

The best kind of queer love story . . . This is a vulnerable, moving, riotously funny and deeply honest book about trans life, first love, art-making, friendship, grief and the hard, slow process of building a home-in a new country, with another person and inside yourself. Bellies celebrates a hundred different kinds of transformation and, like the very best novels, has the power to transform its readers in unexpected ways.

Dinan's debut had me sold on premise alone. Then it completely won me through its complex relationships, immersive travels, found family, honest conversations, and mouthwatering descriptions of Malaysian food.

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

A broad, vivid portrayal of the uncertainty and isolation of life in your twenties ... Bellies is a veritable buffet of a book – we’re lucky to have it.

As [Tom and Ming] navigate their relationship shifting, their friendships changing, and their careers developing, we experience their humor and heartbreak, and root for them as they reckon with their senses of self.

theSkimm, Summer Reads You’ll Be Itching to Binge

A tender tale, dealing with the complexities of transitioning while in a relationship and, indeed, of growing up, with compassion and insight

Nicola Dinan

A riveting tale of finding lasting companionship. Despite the title, it’s unlikely to disappoint.

Disappoint Me is a refreshingly unsentimental and moving exploration of millennial ennui, prickly friendships and toxic masculinity. It eschews essentialism by depicting modern relationships and the flow of power and secrecy with astuteness and compassion, cementing Dinan as one of the UK’s most perceptive young novelists with her finger firmly on the pulse of contemporary behaviour.

Nicola Dinan’s observations are so razor-sharp that you’re sure you’ve met her characters: the self-important East London poet, the over-friendly girl in the bathroom queue, the gap-year student convinced he’s worldly after two weeks on a silent retreat in India. For this reason, every description and bit of dialogue is delicious to read, and if she nailed it in her debut novel Bellies, she’s mastered it in Disappoint Me. The book follows a blossoming relationship between twentysomethings Max and Vincent in present-day London, peppered with flashbacks to Vincent’s first relationship with a trans woman in his teenage years. It is pacy, perfectly pitched and emotionally honest: I loved every page.

A story of millennial fears and forgiveness, reckoning with past mistakes, stylishly interweaving two compelling voices as they unravel their own love story. Disappoint Me follows Dinan’s debut novel, Bellies, which is another example of deeply empathetic writing and elastic endings that stay with you long after.

As the title indicates, it explores the fundamental point that building a sustainable love for someone involves them disappointing you: eventually, the dreams and expectations that we attach to a person will be somewhat compromised. I think the novel explores that so amazingly.

Disappoint Me is anything but a disappointing follow-up in its smart exploration of heteronormativity and the weight of expectation.

Dazed, ‘The 12 Most Anticipated Novels of 2025’

Sharply insightful, warm and heartbreaking.

The author of the award-winning Bellies returns with another insightful dissection of millennial life ... tackling tricky friendships and toxic masculinity.

A riveting, hilarious and totally devastating love story… This exploration of millennial angst, race, and trans panic will have you gripped and sets Dinan as a literary voice to watch.

A very modern love story and Dinan is very much the woman to write it.

In the follow-up to her award-winning and critically acclaimed first novel Bellies, Dinan examines the pain and growth that disillusionment brings... Dinan writes so intelligently about regret, remorse and hope – and still manages to nail humour, too.

Nicola Dinan is able to bring an incisive wit to the big questions of modern relationships: namely, how do we know when to trust another person with our heart and how do we show our love to one another. Disappoint Me is a study in human frailty that is riveting, funny and devastating. It explores heteronormativity, friendship and getting older but, most of all, it’s about confronting the disturbing fact that we cannot ever fully know the person we are sleeping next to. It’s rare I read a book in one sitting but I was carried along by these compelling characters.

Nicola Dinan writes like some kind of demigod, her fictions make thinkable new realities for how we live, what we might expect from each other.

Disappoint Me is an absolute gift. Bursting with big questions about the politics of romance, family, and care, this novel navigates moral and emotional complexity with grace, nuance, and real storytelling nerve. Dinan is a savvy observer of contemporary culture; she writes with wisdom, style and brilliant comic instincts. I loved it.

Oisín McKenna, author of Evenings and Weekends

Nicola Dinan’s second book confirms to me that she is one of our most exciting writers. Delving into how we fall in and out of love, Dinan knows how to write directly to the flaws we show when in love, with biting wit and laugh out loud humour. Yet the characters linger with you after you have finished. Disappoint Me is an addictive read, that I really did not want to end.

Travis Alabanza, author of None of the Above

Dinan has such a deep understanding of people and why they do what they do, how they arrive where they are, she brings the world to us so completely, all the pain, love, joy and mess of it, I feel completely winded by the wholeness of it. Her writing is so beautiful, so affecting it left a lump in my throat.

Annie Lord, author of Notes on Heartbreak

Disappoint Me is a wonder of a novel, hilarious and heartrending in equal measure: one that marries the prickly, delicious pleasures of its keen observational comedy with the riskiest ventures into the unavoidable messiness of true human intimacy. Dinan has created a work of profound heart and clarity, with a vision of fear, love, growth and repair that will give you hope for the future, and with lines so unforgettably funny and true you’ll be sending them to your group chat immediately.

Elaine Castillo, author of America Is Not the Heart

Reading Nicola Dinan’s writing feels like reading the inner workings of your mind on a page. So perceptive and honest about failure and love, and how inextricably linked they are. Disappoint Me is clear evidence of the skill and talent of a writer who does not know how to disappoint, whose prose is vivid, emotive, powerful and funny, and whose ability to make us feel only grows stronger with every story she tells.

Ore Agbaje-Williams, author of The Three of US

Exciting to see this young novelist’s second book already! Couldn’t put it down! I enjoy reading about the millennials & also find them quite mysterious. I appreciate Dinan’s take on timeless questions about the relationship between setting & character. She’s quickly become one of those writers where I’ll just always be reading her new book.

Andrea Lawler, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

Disappoint Me is a mature and assured novel. Its two intersecting stories show that the spaces people hold for each other are always in transition, and I admired Nicola Dinan’s work in elaborating the growing pains of a trans experience muddled by race, class and changing public attitudes.

Disappoint Me is a brilliant and funny love story—the kind that shows us who we are, who we’re scared we might be, and what it really takes to trust another person. Immersive, perceptive, and layered with nuanced truths about friendship, family, queerness, and real romantic partnership. I didn’t want this novel to end.

I adored it. A delicious story of change, and a beautiful meditation on human connection. Dinan is a stunning chef of words and this is a book for greedy readers. I melted into every page like butter and didn’t want it to end.

Brimming with razor sharp wit and compassion, Disappoint Me is a charming, big-hearted love story unlike any I’ve read before. It’s an insightful and brilliant meditation on the existential anxiety of otherness, the intermingling of pride and shame, and forgiveness. Dinan forces us to ask ourselves: are we more than the worst thing we’ve ever done? How do we reckon with our pasts so that we can forge a future? Disappoint Me is an absolute knockout.

Marisa Crane, author of A Sharp Endless Need

Dinan’s prose is heartfelt and endlessly readable. She explores her characters with sympathy and patience, never casting villains, only complicated humans who are trying their best.

Nicola Dinan will be studied in years to come as one of the modern greats... The kind of writing you’ll be talking about for weeks after you’ve finished reading.

Exploring themes of identity, ageing and forgiveness, this novel is original, addictive and thought-provoking.

Confident and captivating in her writing … Dinan is certainly one to watch.

A fresh take on tangled relationships and millennial ennui . . . Dinan unpicks the complications of both [characters'] pasts with delicacy and care.

Dinan is a sharp, observant writer, and Disappoint Me presents big questions about forgiveness, justice and responsibility, about whether people can change after they have done bad things to others, and what sorts of misdeeds we might be willing to accept in our friends, family members and lovers . . . The abundance of compassion that Dinan has for her characters, and that they have for each other, is laudable.

All readers will recognize the characters' struggles to both acknowledge youthful mistakes and decide whether or not to forgive them in oneself or in others. Dinan's second novel is dramatic in scope but is often quietly introspective.

Delivers devastating one-liners, a perfect social read of the queer-literary scene, and a second-act twist.

Nicola Dinan’s first novel, the Lambda finalist Bellies, was a gorgeous tale of platonic entanglement and first love. In Disappoint Me, Dinan builds on her astute portraits of romance to tell the story of Max, a trans woman in her 30s fed up with the way her life has turned out.

A funny, moving and poignant exploration of modern romance and the allure of domesticity from the Polari-prize-winning author of Bellies 
 
Chosen as a ‘Best Book of 2025’ by Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Stylist, Elle, Dazed, Vogue, AnOther, and GQ 
 
'One of the UK’s most perceptive young novelists with her finger firmly on the pulse of contemporary behaviour' Guardian 
 
'Riveting, funny and devastating' Shon Faye, bestselling author of The Transgender Issue 
 
 
Max didn’t mean to fall for Vincent – a corporate lawyer and hobby baker whose trad friendship group are a world away from her life as a trans woman. But after years of bad dates and dysphoria he’s a breath of fresh air. Their connection seems genuine, his care feels real. 
 
But Vincent is carrying his own baggage. On his gap year in Thailand a decade prior, he vies for the attention of a gorgeous traveller, Alex, with secrets of her own. Is Vincent really the new face of the Enlightened Man, or will the ghosts of his past sabotage his and Max’s happiness? 
 
Disappoint Me is an incisive reckoning with forgiveness and the complexity of modern relationships, told with Nicola Dinan’s trademark wit and heart.

Nicola Dinan

Praise for Disappoint Me

A riveting tale of finding lasting companionship. Despite the title, it’s unlikely to disappoint.

Disappoint Me is a refreshingly unsentimental and moving exploration of millennial ennui, prickly friendships and toxic masculinity. It eschews essentialism by depicting modern relationships and the flow o ...

Nicola Dinan’s observations are so razor-sharp that you’re sure you’ve met her characters: the self-important East London poet, the over-friendly girl in the bathroom queue, the gap-year student convinced he’ ...

A riveting tale of finding lasting companionship. Despite the title, it’s unlikely to disappoint.

Disappoint Me is a refreshingly unsentimental and moving exploration of millennial ennui, prickly friendships and toxic masculinity. It eschews essentialism by depicting modern relationships and the flow o ...

Nicola Dinan’s observations are so razor-sharp that you’re sure you’ve met her characters: the self-important East London poet, the over-friendly girl in the bathroom queue, the gap-year student convinced he’ ...

A riveting tale of finding lasting companionship. Despite the title, it’s unlikely to disappoint.

Disappoint Me is a refreshingly unsentimental and moving exploration of millennial ennui, prickly friendships and toxic masculinity. It eschews essentialism by depicting modern relationships and the flow o ...

Nicola Dinan’s observations are so razor-sharp that you’re sure you’ve met her characters: the self-important East London poet, the over-friendly girl in the bathroom queue, the gap-year student convinced he’ ...

Books by Nicola Dinan

Articles featuring Nicola Dinan

Extract: Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter