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Book Summary and Reviews of Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan

Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan

Disappoint Me

A Novel

by Nicola Dinan

  • Publishes:
  • May 27, 2025, 320 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

An electrifying story of love, betrayal, and the complicated allure of bougie domesticity from award-nominated author Nicola Dinan.

I don't know why I feel like I've been caught doing something dirty. Cheating on queerness. Fell down the stairs and woke up a trad wife.

Thirty years old with a lifetime of dysphoria and fuccbois rattling around in her head, Max is plagued by a deep dissatisfaction. Shouldn't these be the best years of her life? Why doesn't it feel that way? After taking a spill down the stairs at a New Year's Eve party, she decides to make some changes. First: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity.

Max thinks she's found the answer in Vincent. While his corporate colleagues, trad friends, and Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman, he cares for Max in a way she'd always dismissed as a foolish fantasy. But he is also carrying baggage of his own. When the fall-out of a decades-old entanglement resurfaces, Max must decide what forgiveness really means. Can we be more than our worst mistakes? Is it possible to make peace with the past?

Funny, sharp, and poignant, Disappoint Me is a sweeping exploration of love, loss, trans panic, race, millennial angst, and the relationships—familial and romantic—that make us who we are.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"With this striking work, Dinan establishes herself as an invaluable voice in contemporary fiction." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

This information about Disappoint Me was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Nicola Dinan

Nicola Dinan grew up in Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur and now lives in London. Bellies, her debut, won the Polari First Book Prize, was shortlisted for the Diverse Book Awards and Mo Siewcharran Prize, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, and was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize.

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