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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.
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (12/11/2025)
Currently reading Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan
-c_engstrom
"With this striking work, Dinan establishes herself as an invaluable voice in contemporary fiction." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Bursting with big questions about the politics of romance, family, and care, this novel navigates moral and emotional complexity with grace, nuance, and real storytelling nerve." ―Oisín McKenna, author of Evenings and Weekends
"Hilarious and heartrending in equal measure, with lines so unforgettably funny and true you'll be sending them to your group chat immediately." ―Elaine Castillo, author of How to Read Now
"A charming, big-hearted love story unlike any I've read before ... Dinan forces us to ask ourselves: Are we more than the worst thing we've ever done? An absolute knockout." ―Marisa Crane, author of A Sharp Endless Need
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.
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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