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.

The inspiration came from a friend telling me about two people he knew in an open relationship, one of whom was delighted with their way of life, while the other was fed up and longing to be exclusive. A year or so later, I was sketching out some ideas for a romantic comedy, and I felt like the story of one side of an open relationship had lots of potential for humour and a dose of drama. That's what's so nice about having an ensemble cast is that you don't feel limited thematically to a particular group of people or a particular community. There's room to expand to speak to something broader. It is definitely a second adolescence. EC: You’re currently adapting Bellies for the screen; the atmosphere of the book feels so distinct that I found myself wondering, was there any music you’d want to use in a TV adaptation, or that you think would be good to listen to while reading it? 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.

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While the central metaphor of vulnerability and intimacy is paramount, I could not help but notice how much of the title also derives from Dinan's exploration of hunger. Hunger for identity and a positive self-concept, yes, but also the literal hunger that influences it: Bellies is full of descriptions of food, and it also goes into detail into the relationships its various characters have with it, whether in terms of physical body image or a sense of cultural identity. All that food, particularly Malaysian food, is a necessary inclusion in the novel that very subtly illuminates Ming's experience as a trans woman of colour. While her perspective is presented to readers in fewer chapters compared to Tom, her character can be understood more fully through the ways in which her native cuisine is presented to us: it is a link, for her, between her past and a present in which she is more at home with herself but is also unable to go home to a place where her very existence is illegal. What has always fascinated me about London is that for such a densely populated place, with such a varied demographic, we still exist here more as subsets than a collective community. There’s still a lot of tribalism in London, whether that’s the territorialism of the north/south river divide, or the us versus them mentality of wealth and/or diaspora which provides real grist for a writer. My debut novel, Bellies, has two protagonists. There’s Tom, a white, middle-class Mark Fisher-and-techno-loving boy from south London (sorry). And then there’s Ming, an exuberant playwright from Malaysia who suffers from OCD. They fall in love at university – seemingly as two gay men – but after moving to London following graduation, Ming comes out as trans.

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. 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. 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.” EC: Given that focus on potential legacy, what would you most like readers to take away from reading Bellies ? 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?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 EC: We see Tom and Ming at their best and their worst, and at times I found it genuinely challenging to keep seeing the world through their eyes. What’s your view on the benefits of keeping narrative focus and empathy on characters who are being unlikeable, foolish, or cruel? As a trans woman, Dinan has her own experience of transitioning. In Bellies, she was keen to look at something “which is seen as so personal” from the perspective of someone one step removed. “I was interested in what it meant to be on the outside of someone else’s experience—and an experience that is deeply personal to them, like someone’s transness.” It was also important to her to offer a more pluralised view of queer and trans identities which, at times in fiction, can be relatively one-note. “[Ming] does things and you think, ‘Oh my God, you’re awful’ or, ‘You’re being awful in this moment’. But at the same time, just like the rest of us she is allowed to be...” Elaborating, she says: “There’s an impetus to create this virtuous image of a trans person who can do no wrong. I find that very limiting…I want trans people to have the freedom to be a bit shit too.” Instead she advocates for fully fleshed-out, authentic, multitudinous representation. “If we truly want to aim for fiction being an effective way to raise empathy for disenfranchised and marginalised communities, we have to write characters that are fallible. It’s not actually helpful to the cause to have these perfect characters, because when you create a solely virtuous narrative around a group of people, people look for ways to prove that wrong.” Picture this 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 GQ Magazine I enjoyed the first third of this but once the most major plot shift takes place, I struggled to get past the writing style: every single movement a character makes is described, the position of each character in relation to each other character is described, myriad inanimate and insignificant objects are described, th

ND: It would have been easier to devote those resources to Ming, for sure. What’s interesting is that I think some would expect a book which has transitioning at its centre to entirely focus on the trans character, but while transitioning is an essential plotline of the novel, more than anything it’s a novel about relationships, love, how love transforms from one thing to another. Part of why I wanted to include Tom’s voice as well is to centre the relational aspect of the change that’s going on in Ming’s life; suddenly something that feels so obscure and specific to so many people, transitioning, becomes a little more universal. It becomes this thing that could be akin to a geographical move, or a bereavement, all these things that happen in our relationships that change how we relate to one another, and can, potentially, pull us apart.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. 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.

Until it isn’t. After a while, Ming starts being distant from Tom and reveals that he is considering transitioning. Suddenly, the novel turns from boy-meets-boy romance to something much more interesting. Traversing the pitfalls of the gender transition novel, Dinan, who herself is trans, deftly weaves a compelling and compassionate narrative that feels totally unique in this year’s literary calendar. This is a lovely debut; eager, youthful, authentic and with an optimistic heart beat even in its darkest moments Pandora Sykes

Although dealing intimately with love, Dinan does not characterise the novel explicitly as a love story. She says: “I suppose it is a love story, but in a lot of ways it’s a subversion… It subverts the tropes of a love story in that Ming’s journey creates this fundamental incompatibility between Tom and Ming. So these two characters are left to negotiate what love actually is. That is the story: two characters negotiating what love can be between two people when other things are in the way.” It’s not actually helpful to the cause to have these perfect characters, because when you create a solely virtuous narrative around a group of people, people look for ways to prove that wrong ND: I have a Bellies playlist! It was fun to think about what music goes with each chapter – the novel has a very nostalgic feel to it, because it draws on this nostalgic time, being in your early twenties at university and finishing university. It’s also situated in the late 2010s and early 2020, so there’s a specific period it’s drawing on. You’ve got some Shygirl in there, some Hot Chip, a good chunk of Azealia Banks, and there are songs that are specifically referenced in the book like Aphex Twin and Don’t Stop Now by Dua Lipa. And it ends on Ribs by Lorde, of course. 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 Happy Hour, we meet Isa and Gala, two carefree young women visiting New York for a summer. The friends are broke and get by on the favours of men who buy them free drinks, pay for their cabs and give them gifts. In Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, Lenu and Lila come of age in a violent postwar Naples, embroiled in fights between communists and fascists, with (unhappy) marriage being one of the only means of escaping poverty.