In the opening chapters of Nicola Dinan’s debut novel, Ming, an intelligent young playwright from Kuala Lumpur, is seen from the perspective of adorably awkward Tom. They fall for each other at a British university, where Ming presents as a fey boy with an air of self-possession. But the lovers wake in bedsheets drenched from night sweats, a side effect of the citalopram prescribed for Ming’s OCD. Ming’s mother, and lodestar, died six years ago.
Tom learns about Ming’s vulnerabilities in fragments – which is much how Tom discovers himself. Tom sports thick vintage jeans and a sweatshirt with an ornithological logo: “No, actually, I’m not super into birds.” He has cultivated a look that will make him appear as if he “didn’t care but cared enough”. Tom is, Ming points out, the son of “middle-class Camberwell gentrifiers who worship at the church of Ottolenghi and knitted alpaca cardigans”.
