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I had been in a relationship with someone for just over ten years when I woke up one morning, opened my eyes and knew that things needed to come to a close. By any stretch of the imagination, there was nothing wrong with the relationship at all. We had been living together for quite some time, we were comfortable, we had a routine, we were coasting. “No alarms and no surprises,�� as the man once sang. But in a relationship that had been borne from our shared creativity and our determination to see our creative goals blossom, we had stopped challenging each other, we had stopped daring each other to push harder and to do more. By the end of that day, most of my things were already in boxes ready to move forward and away.

Disappoint Me begins with a fall. A literal fall down a flight of stairs at a New Year’s party. It’s the kind of fall that, as you read about it, you can picture it in your head, both from the outside perspective of those witnessing it, as well as firmly ensconced in the mind of the heroine at the heart of the story, Max. It’s the kind of fall that as it’s happening to you, it feels as if decades pass until you reach the end. It’s the kind of fall that has a singular moment of clarity when you land that lasts a mere second for onlookers, but for you extends the length of eternity as you find the space to examine your current place in life, the choices that you’ve made to arrive at this place and the choices that you will need to make to escape this place. It’s the kind of fall that forces you to wake up and walk away.

For Max, it’s the kind of fall that subconsciously allows her to drift away from the extreme highs and lows of the never-ending party that is the artistic, queer London party scene of her twenties as she meets Vincent, a somewhat slick, somewhat rigid, but kind and attentive corporate lawyer after the two match on a dating app. Max is a published poet that’s struggled to find the words and the will to pen another poetry collection as she “falls back�� on her career as a lawyer spending her days being the secret, uncredited voice behind an AI law app. After being mired in the muck of a five year relationship with a fellow writer more attuned to his own ego and the coif of his hair, Max is unfamiliar with attention from a partner that feels honest and considerate rather than conditional and transactional.

But Max, a trans woman just having crossed over into her thirties, has doubts about Vincent’s intentions and her own feelings towards someone that wasn’t spawned from the same literary and art scene that is the foundation of most of her social circle. As the relationship deepens and their lives become more intertwined and involved, Max marvels at how easily she slipped into a relationship that feels more heteronormative without even trying, at one point remarking “fell down the stairs and woke up a trad wife�� as she takes in the surroundings and trappings that she and Vincent have built together.

The narration of Disappoint Me alternates between that of Max in the current day and with Vincent at the age of nineteen as he’s in the midst of a gap year that finds him with a plan to travel to meet his childhood best friend in Thailand. Nicola Dinan does a masterful job at creating two distinctly unique voices in her two narrators as Max reads as deeply intelligent, witty and self-effacing (almost Fleabag-esque in her mannerisms and voice) whereas the younger version of Vincent comes across as exactly what you would expect of a young man with the means to experience a year travelling the world with very few limits, if any.

As their relationship deepens, their separate worlds collide as family issues arise on both sides when Max’s brother announces that he’s about to become a father despite having ended his own relationship with the mother several months previously and Vincent’s father suffers a massive heart attack that shocks the entire family and sets Vincent into action to help care for his ailing father. Interspersed with the story of their blossoming relationship, the events of Vincent’s gap year abroad in Thailand with his best friend and a mysterious woman named Alex slowly come to light that paint Vincent in a much different and more sinister light than the man currently holding a grip on Max’s heart and call into question his reasons for wanting to be with Max in the first place.

Where Disappoint Me shines is in the time that it spends luxuriating in conversations between it’s characters. Max’s family and her best friend, Simone, are a particular delight to share time with as each interaction with them exposes some new layer of their complicated relationships with each other. Nicola Dinan revels in crafting scenes that expose the raw nerves of tense situations and lets you sit inside of them just long enough to grasp and experience the awkward, awful feelings that can arise when dealing with family trauma, distrust and the pain that comes with trying to adjust to adulthood.

After finishing my time with Disappoint Me, I had the chance to read through a few interviews with Nicola Dinan and discovered that not only is she currently working on her third novel in which she genre jumps over to sci-fi, but that she’s already in the planning stages for her fourth novel. In other words, we will be eating extremely well for the foreseeable future in regards to this remarkable new voice in literature.

I’d like to thank The Dial Press, Random House Publishing Group, NetGalley and or course, Nicola Dinan for the opportunity to read and review an advanced copy of this stunning new novel.