Nicola Dinan’s debut novel Bellies begins on familiar terrain – a group of college students at the union bar, the beginnings of attraction between two students, Tom and Ming – but as Dinan closely follows their relationship, the book shifts from the kind of generic story you think it’s going to be, to the kind of story that becomes a lasting favourite with unforgettable characters.
Dinan grew up in Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur and now lives in London. She studied at Cambridge and trained as a lawyer before turning to writing. Bellies tells the story of Tom and Ming in alternating chapters and skips over periods of time, much like Sally Rooney did with Connell and Marianne in Normal People. (Element Pictures, who adapted Normal People, have also secured the rights to Bellies.) After a few difficult and anxious months, Ming tells Tom that she wants to transition and the book’s core dilemmas emerge – what is love that alters when it alteration finds? Does our partner’s gender change how we feel about them? Is sexuality fluid or rigid? This is as complex a love story as it gets and it is delicately and movingly handled by Dinan as she explores the essential questions of love and identity.
None of this would work if Dinan’s writing wasn’t as good as it is, intelligent and light, with lots of wry humour throughout. When Ming’s flatmate asks: “Was he the transphobic one?” Ming says no. “But he hated your play,” she offers. “That’s not what transphobic is,” Ming deadpans. There are also many beautiful descriptions that stop you in your tracks, like this moment, when Tom undresses Ming. “The panels of his corset split with the tectonic slowness of continents, his back the mantle from which the world would open.”
Dinan creates real emotional depth as she explores the fact that sometimes to become ourselves we must become someone else. The deft layering of the painful loss of a friend with the slow-release pain of a romantic loss has a devastating effect on the reader. (You have been warned, have your tissues ready.)
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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.
