Disappoint Me is a novel structured around meals, whether assembled distractedly or seasoned with care, and people making strained conversation over birthday barbecues or overpriced small plates in Hackney restaurants. Like her cult debut Bellies, Nicola Dinan’s highly readable and engrossing second novel paints mealtimes as a sociocultural ritual as much as a means of giving characters something to chew on while they reach new understandings or fail to connect. Food and sex, talk and pointed silence, the heart and the stomach are deftly entwined in this deeply contemporary story which explores friendship, queerness, the pacifying allure of couplehood and evolving social mores among millennial Londoners.

Reformed party girl Max meets gallant lawyer Vincent over a sushi date in the opening pages: not so much a meet cute as a swipe right, that’ll do. Dinan is adept at capturing the apathy and cynicism engrained in dating via “the apps”, where the paradox of choice gives rise to a second-guessing diffidence and a shirking of real intimacy. “Would I have sex with Vincent? I guess. If he’s nice,” Max muses. The two bond over their shared Chinese heritage and corporate backgrounds, and to her surprise Max finds an understated attraction and the promise of something meaningful growing between them.

As a mixed-race trans woman, Max is used to people making reductive assumptions about her identity. Her prickliness and understandable sensitivity make her a contradictory and complicated protagonist; both dissociative and painfully attuned to those around her, drolly sarcastic yet striving for sincerity and transcendence through writing. A poet who works as the overpaid legal counsel for a tech company, her disillusionment at her job aggravates her longstanding dysphoria and existential malaise. Her voice is acerbic, often hovering between irony and outright melancholy. Her zingers are cutting and camp: an annoying acquaintance is a “Poundland Arca”- referring to the uber-cool non-binary Venezuelan music producer – and a hangover is “like an angry twink has poured poppers into my skull”.

An ugly breakup and minor accident have left Max’s already fragile self-esteem in tatters, and Vincent represents a light at the end of a tunnel, “a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity”. From the outset, he seems emotionally stable, unproblematic and reliable. He constantly tells her she’s beautiful, and he even bakes. Max ponders her new partner – “a Chinese lawyer, your mum really got to you. If anyone says he’s gay for dating a trans woman, show that picture of him in a shacket at the pub, holding someone else’s sausage dog”. Disappoint Me is an ingenious title, setting the reader up for the question of when and how the seemingly wholesome and evolved Vincent will be revealed as a less than ideal partner. Or is it Max herself who will act out a self-destructive prophecy of romantic failure?

Max’s narration in 2023 is interspersed with Vincent’s point of view during a pivotal gap year trip to Thailand in 2012. While bar hopping with strangers from his hostel, someone cracks a crass joke about ladyboys and refers to trans women as “it” – a reflection of the era’s dehumanising views. Through its contrasting timelines, the novel poses the question of whether those views have merely been obscured by virtue-signalling niceties; camouflaged under modern etiquette. It does the same with attitudes towards race and otherness: Vincent meets a beautiful and warm young woman named Alex at the hostel and confides that as a Chinese boy growing up in Britain, people called him “Vincent Ching Chong all the way through primary school”. His infatuation with Alex forms the crux of Vincent’s storyline, complicated when his aggressively straight best friend, Fred, also falls for her.

Fred and Vincent are still friends in the 2023 sections, but the narrative lacuna left by Alex intrigues and unsettles. The inarticulacy and passive aggressiveness that can clog longstanding male friendships is especially well drawn, as is the portrayal of Max’s brother Jamie: all steam-rolling privilege, obtuseness and self-denial. Max and Vincent may not be the most endearing of protagonists, and they are certainly not fun at parties – but as a couple they are believable and easy to root for as they struggle with how best to love each other despite their messiness and the secrets Vincent is keeping from Max about his past paramour and less than stellar behaviour.

Much more than just a love story, Disappoint Me is a refreshingly unsentimental and moving exploration of millennial ennui, prickly friendships and toxic masculinity. It eschews essentialism by depicting modern relationships and the flow of power and secrecy with astuteness and compassion, cementing Dinan as one of the UK’s most perceptive young novelists with her finger firmly on the pulse of contemporary behaviour.

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