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

Wiz Wharton

Bellies follow the interweaving lives of Tom and Ming as they each struggle with belonging and identity. We watch them through an unbiased lens and come to know them as if they were our friends too. Set firmly in a landscape I know so well, and with central and side characters who are so dynamic, Bellies truly feels like a story I lived through. What’s more telling of an impactful story than when you close the book but the characters live on? I have also experienced incredible kindness, pride and joy here which I’ve not found in other cities, which I think is symptomatic of it being so densely and variously inhabited. When you have a population with such experiential richness, you can’t help but live in hope of it teaching and engendering tolerance and empathy. And, of course, that richness informs its output in terms of culture and history and innovation and the stories that come from that. First of all, I just wanted to talk a bit about how things are going for you. I know you’re already adapting Bellies into a screenplay and are at a third draft stage with your second novel, Disappoint Me. It must be a bit of a whirlwind, what has all of this been like for you?

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 It's those moments where you just feel so incapable of doing the things that everyone says are supposed to be super normal for someone your age. It's destabilising, but I also think everyone should have these wobbles where they feel that way. 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. It begins as your typical boy meets boy. While out with friends at a university drag night, Tom buys Ming a drink. 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. But, shortly after they move to London to start their next chapter, Ming announces her intention to transition.This is a lovely debut; eager, youthful, authentic and with an optimistic heart beat even in its darkest moments Pandora Sykes The vast differences between those two reactions has shown me that the ways that art interacts with the world are so unpredictable, and I don’t want to be prescriptive with what people find in Bellies . More than anything, I’m just excited to see what people can get out of it. 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 Liv Little, author of Rosewater 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.

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.Over Zoom, AnOther spoke to Dinan about transition stories, writing Malaysian food, and what’s in her Bellies playlist.

I wanted to capture the turbulence of both transitioning and being in your early twenties. I also wanted to offer the perspective of a character who isn't trans, but instead observes their partner’s transition. It felt like a story I hadn’t seen, and transness has always been an interesting prism through which I view other aspects of life: extraordinary periods of change, how we grow apart from other people, fundamental incompatibilities in relationships.

Select a format:

I’m really interested in what the process of adapting Bellies to screen is like, especially as one of the most compelling things about Bellies is the interiority of Tom and Ming. I particularly loved the really vivid stream of consciousness style in her early chapters. Could you talk a bit about the processes of creating a distinctive voice for both of them? 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. 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. In both tales, women use their sexual currency to obtain financial capital, in some way subverting the misogyny they face. However, Ferrante in particular suggests these transactions slowly rot one’s spirit. Perhaps Isa and Gala, Lenu and Lila bond over the secret knowledge that while these exchanges feel wrong, there are few better options for making ends meet. And as the novels develop, the friends give each other the courage to resist social expectations, to rebel. But, shortly after they move to London to start their next chapter, Ming announces her intention to transition. From London to Kuala Lumpur, New York to Cologne, we follow Tom and Ming as they face shifts in their relationship in the wake of Ming's transition.