Nicola Dinan

bellies

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Bellies

It's here! Browse the 2024 Penguin Christmas gift guide

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

Bellies

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Nicola Dinan

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