Bellies: ‘A beautiful love story’ Irish Times

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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?

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.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 Thoughtful, seductive, and entirely engrossing - Bellies is already a classic' Bryan Washington, author of Memorial and Lot 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 ND: Sometimes, to truly empathise with characters, they need to be a bit cruel. They need, at times, to be unfair and unreasonable, because people are unfair and unreasonable. I don’t want people to read Bellies and empathise with Bellies because they think they’re seeing their best selves in the novel. It’s far more interesting to reflect people as they are. I don’t think we learn from characters that are overly virtuous, particularly if they’re minorities like Ming – it just reaffirms the fear that we are not entitled to the same flaws and spectrum of emotions as everyone else, and that is damaging. Everyone in the book is flawed. You have Tom’s best friend Rob, who is a bit of a shit to girls, but at the same time is a really lovely supportive loyal friend. You have Ming’s dad, who genuinely wants what’s best for Ming, but it’s his own vision of what’s best for Ming, not necessarily hers.

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 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. It's definitely one of those skills that you have to constantly practise as well. You can really easily fall out of touch of how you like to write, or like why you like to write, if you're not writing all the time.

On a trip to Malaysia, where Ming’s mother died – and “it’s not so hot for the gays”, reports Ming – the couple eat kuih seri muka and yong tau foo. Dinan summons different locations with supple grace. (“Places move into people just as much as people move into places,” she writes.) She is also deft at depicting intimacy. Tom and Ming listen to each other’s bellies gurgle, watch Britney Spears’s snake dance on a laptop and practise Meisner technique, a theatre exercise of closely observing a partner’s actions.

Dinan grants the reader privileged access to both sides of the relationship, telling the story in chapters written from Tom and Ming’s separate perspectives. What results is a wry, minutely observed coming-of-age that deftly captures the closeness, intensity and vulnerability of romantic love. This almost split-screen structural approach brings depth and complexity to the characters she has drawn. “I think by doing that it made it a lot easier to create two characters where neither was the good guy or the bad guy either. That moral complexity and dubiousness within each character was sort of necessary for the book. And not just Tom and Ming, I wanted the whole cast of characters to be equally fallible… I wanted a messiness within each character and I do think offering both perspectives, and offering both perspectives where one is critical of the other, is necessary and helpful in achieving that.” 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.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.