Description

From the author of the acclaimed Cherry Beach comes a thrilling exploration of love and desire – obsessive, all-consuming, and impossible to look away from.

On an ordinary day, two women meet on a train. Heloise – the older woman – lives with her boyfriend in Melbourne.

Lacey – the other woman – is from Aotearoa and studies the clouds.

What follows is anything but ordinary, a passionate affair that will consume them both in mismatched and maddening ways.

Propulsive and lyrical, Worry Doll examines desire, memory, and the delusion of love.

Publisher Review

‘Intense and uneasily claustrophobic … McPhee-Browne captures how a particular kind of sexual desire obliterates everything else extremely effectively, plunging the reader into Heloise’s increasingly unsettled – and unsettling – interior world.’ — James Bradley * The Saturday Paper * ‘Two women unmoor one another in Laura McPhee-Browne’s claustrophobic third novel … Worry Doll suggests many things are difficult to hold: trauma, a person, or simply the words to express things. Gentle, lonely, dreamy, pained, Worry Doll is about yearning to unlock a person, whether it’s oneself or someone else.’ — Declan Fry * ABC News * ‘A deliciously seductive and suspenseful novel about the slipperiness of desire and memory, Worry Doll upends expectations at every turn, revealing the way we are all unreliable narrators when it comes to love. Laura McPhee-Browne has arrived at a thrilling new voice – confident, daring, and alive to the dark magic that beats at the heart of erotic obsession.’ — Madelaine Lucas, author of Thirst For Salt ‘An unflinching, unnerving, exquisitely observed double portrait of human longing and discordance.’ * Miles Allinson, author of In Moonland * ‘A gripping, utterly embodied story of desire. No one writes sensuality like McPhee-Browne. The pulsing, breathing prose is beguiling, while the slippery narrative haunts long after the final page.’ — Katherine Brabon, author of The Cure ‘Worry Doll is an utterly addictive tale of sapphic obsession. Thrilling, subversive and double-edged – it consumed me.’ — Anna Snoekstra, author of The Ones We Love Praise for Little Plum:

‘An embodied and magical novel – so dark and earthy, colourful, and frightening.’ — Ellena Savage, author of Blueberries ‘Immersive and introspective … McPhee-Browne deftly captures the inner worlds of women at different life stages. Much of the pleasure of reading McPhee-Browne lies in her finely observed attention to everyday experience, creating space for readers to recognise themselves in the text … Worry Doll is for readers who felt seen and understood by Normal People by Sally Rooney and A Room Called Earth by Madeleine Ryan.’ — Danielle Bagnato * Books+Publishing * Praise for Little Plum:

‘I didn’t so much read Little Plum as breathe it. Laura McPhee-Browne has an extraordinary ability to summon the ordinary and fill it with such significance and beauty that one has no choice but to inhabit her novels. At once exquisite and unsettling, dark and tender, Little Plum is a triumph.’ — Hannah Kent, author of Burial Rites Praise for Little Plum:

‘Little Plum draws us so lightly into the depths that we don’t know how far it’s taken us until we can’t go back. With dark insight and masterly grace, Laura McPhee-Browne reminds us that our bodies can know things we don’t, that experience can save or afflict us, and that possession can invest us with beautiful and terrible things.’ — Ronnie Scott, author of The Adversary Praise for Cherry Beach:

‘Like sparkling wine on a sunny afternoon, Cherry Beach goes down easily – and leaves a killer hangover. A vibrant, tender debut from a bright new voice in Australian fiction. I loved every minute of it.’ — Laura Elizabeth Woollett, author of The Love of a Bad Man Praise for Cherry Beach:

‘This beautiful novel is tender: tender like a loving touch, and tender like a bruise. Cherry Beach will seduce you with its lush and gorgeous detail and its unguarded openness, and then it will rip your heart out. In its rawness and its yearning, Cherry Beach exquisitely captures the intensity of youth, love, desire, and loss.’ — Emily Bitto, author of The Strays