Nicola Dinan

Bellies

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A coming-of-age story about falling in and out of love, brimming with humour and heartbreak, Bellies asks: is it worth losing a part of yourself to become who you are?

Discover the beautiful coming-of-age story about falling in-and-out of love, brimming with humour and heartbreak.

It begins as your typical boy meets boy.

Tom and Ming meet on a night out at university and fall hard for each other. It’s not long before they are planning a future and building a life.

Then Ming announces her intention to transition.

As Tom and Ming both face shifts in their relationship and confront the vastly different shapes their lives have taken, they must both ask if it is worth losing a part of themselves – or each other – to become the people they want to be.

Author: Nicola Dinan

Paperback Published 13 August 2024  336 pages

Read and Reviewed by Kae:

"Nicola Dinan’s debut novel is a searingly observational chronicle of a group of individuals jutting in and out of their relationships to one another, romantic and platonic, centring around lead characters Tom and Ming whose ‘gay’ relationship, and all of the external dynamics attached to it, are upheaved when Ming comes out as a trans woman. A seemingly simple premise, but one that cleverly contemplates a multiplicity of transitions (other than just gender) that come with being a person amongst others, traversing place, age, love, and tragedy.  

Dinan navigates the intricacies of queer friendship and love with both a sensitivity for its material and the vulnerable populations it represents, while also giving voice to the anxieties, shames, internalised misogyny/transphobia/homophobia/racism – that is, the bad feelings- that our communities endure. I find that a lot of queer novels feel condemned to a binary of depicting either queer joy or queer trauma, an arbitrary binary that filters what stories (and what shadows of them) are allowed out of our communities, a decision moderated by people other than us.

Rather, to read this novel by a trans person, about trans and queer people, and to bear witness to the many dualities, hypocrisies, good and bad feelings that I too experience, felt like a revelation. It was so affirming to read a queer narrative that didn’t feel like it was explaining itself raw, which instead gave more space to rifling through the messy homo-platonic-romantic-sexual-and-everything-in-between-makeup of queer existence.

While most obviously designated a ‘romance’ novel, what stood out to me the most about this book was its depiction of friendship, and the enduring quality of love that sits outside of (and after) conventional romance. Reading it made me want to call my friends, cry in their arms, bring them baked goods, and just express… I suppose gratitude?

Bellies was deliciously pulpy enough to make me want to keep reading, in the way that watching semi-trashy TV feels, while also being genuinely very well written and a narrative with much thought and delicacy, kind of like if a Sally Rooney novel was by/for/about gay people. I absolutely recommend for those in between more ‘heavy’ reads looking for something light-hearted but still with substance."

 

'Smart, hilarious and deeply moving' Elliot Page, author of Pageboy

'Thoughtful, seductive, and entirely engrossing - Bellies is already a classic' Bryan Washington, author of Memorial and Lot

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