Polari Award Winner Nicola Dinan for Disappoint Me

‘Nicola Dinan writes like some kind of demigod, her fictions make thinkable new realities for how we live, what we might expect from each other’ TORREY PETERS

Chosen as a ‘Best Book of 2025’ by the Guardian, Harper’s Bazaar, Sunday Times Style, Cosmopolitan, Stylist, ELLE, Dazed, Vogue, AnOther, SheerLuxe and GQ: Disappoint Me by Polari First Book Award winner Nicola Dinan.

A voice-driven, funny and poignant exploration of millennial angst, race, trans panic, and the allure of bougie domesticity, Disappoint Me will delight and provoke readers in equal measure.

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?