‘I’ve been thinking about how the trunks of trees bend and curve when they grow next to each other. Their leaves twist to accommodate each other. Their closeness reads on the shape of them, and you can infer the shape of one from the shape of another. When you know someone and you grow together, your shape and form become theirs.’

When Tom and Ming meet dressed in drag at a uni party, there’s an immediate comfort and connection between them that quickly blooms into easy intimacy and tender love. In the safety of their relationship though, Ming comes to understand that she is a woman: a realisation that she tries to delay, knowing that her journey to love herself might come at the cost of being loved by Tom.

Told through a series of dual narrative vignettes charting several years of their lives, we see Tom and Ming love, lose, and come to love each other anew. God, it made me yearn for my youth. Both Tom and Ming transition in and out of loneliness in their efforts to understand who they are and what they want. Yet, even as they wound one another, become distant, and seem to leave each other’s lives, there is love between them. Bellies is such a beautiful exploration of that sentimentality we all have for those formative relationships that help us understand ourselves. Though often we end up growing at different paces, growing in different directions, growing apart completely, there’s still gratitude and there will always be love.

Dinan magnificently captures the hypocrisies of what it means and how it feels to be human in her dizzyingly lyrical and emotive prose. The closing chapters put me in mind of Ishiguro, particularly Never Let Me Go (my favourite book, the highest praise I can give), and just as with NLMG I cried my way through to the end. Bellies is at once devastating and intensely joyful. I’m already finding myself longing to return to the embrace of its pages and the companionship of its charaters. I want more time with, and for, them all.