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Disappoint Me

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Disappoint Me

By: Nicola Dinan
Narrated by: Mei Mei MacLeod, Martin Sarreal
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Max is thirty, a published poet and grossly overpaid legal counsel for a tech company. She’s living her best life! Or is she? The debris of years of dysphoria and failed relationships rattle around in her head. When she tumbles down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party and wakes up in hospital alone, she decides to make some changes. First things first: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity.

Enter Vincent, corporate lawyer and hobby baker. His trad friendship group may as well speak a different language to Max, and his Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman. It’s uncertain terrain, but Vincent cares for Max in a way she’d long given up on as a foolish fantasy.

Yet Vincent is carrying his own baggage. On his gap year in Thailand a decade prior, he vies for the attention of a gorgeous traveller, Alex, with secrets of her own. Is Vincent really the new face of the Enlightened Man, or will the ghosts of his past sabotage his and Max’s happiness?

'Nicola Dinan’s second book confirms to me that she is one of our most exciting writers . . . Disappoint Me is an addictive read, that I really did not want to end' Travis Alabanza, author of None of the Above

© Nicola Dinan 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

 Friendship Genre Fiction Humorous Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Women's Fiction

Critic reviews

A riveting tale of finding lasting companionship. Despite the title, it’s unlikely to disappoint.
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.
Nicola Dinan’s observations are so razor-sharp that you’re sure you’ve met her characters: the self-important East London poet, the over-friendly girl in the bathroom queue, the gap-year student convinced he’s worldly after two weeks on a silent retreat in India. For this reason, every description and bit of dialogue is delicious to read, and if she nailed it in her debut novel Bellies, she’s mastered it in Disappoint Me. The book follows a blossoming relationship between twentysomethings Max and Vincent in present-day London, peppered with flashbacks to Vincent’s first relationship with a trans woman in his teenage years. It is pacy, perfectly pitched and emotionally honest: I loved every page.
A story of millennial fears and forgiveness, reckoning with past mistakes, stylishly interweaving two compelling voices as they unravel their own love story. Disappoint Me follows Dinan’s debut novel, Bellies, which is another example of deeply empathetic writing and elastic endings that stay with you long after.
As the title indicates, it explores the fundamental point that building a sustainable love for someone involves them disappointing you: eventually, the dreams and expectations that we attach to a person will be somewhat compromised. I think the novel explores that so amazingly.
Disappoint Me is anything but a disappointing follow-up in its smart exploration of heteronormativity and the weight of expectation.
Sharply insightful, warm and heartbreaking.
The author of the award-winning Bellies returns with another insightful dissection of millennial life ... tackling tricky friendships and toxic masculinity.
A riveting, hilarious and totally devastating love story… This exploration of millennial angst, race, and trans panic will have you gripped and sets Dinan as a literary voice to watch.
A very modern love story and Dinan is very much the woman to write it.
All stars
Most relevant
I was hooked from the start and tore through this. It was beautifully read and the writing and storytelling is astonishing… it’s dramatic and brilliant and the characters are so well rendered. Loved it

Beautiful, rich, compelling, addictive!

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The characters felt so realistic, like Ive met each of them. Dinan’s signature dual narrative of two romantic partners works as well here as it did in her first novel, Bellies.

Overall it was excellent!

Well rounded cast of characters

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The book is brilliant. Hope she writes many more. The narration is really good too, great characters and accents

Rarely feel so identified with an inner monologue

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I found this really good to listen to and enjoy. The characters are well formed and their interactions are excellent. The way it switches at times between narrators - in both text and audio - is very well done and gives a really nice flow to the stories and, ultimately, the story.

It's not a story with a beginning, middle and end as such and leaves a lot to your imagination at the end but it does wrap things up pretty well. As an insight into the lives, loves and struggles of trans women, I found it really interesting. I cannot speak for its accuracy or the topics are covered in a good way but I did find that it represented how the characters felt and acted very well done.

Good story, moves along well. Good characters

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