Laura McPhee-Browne

A hypnotic and absorbing debut novel from an extraordinary new talent—a must-read for fans of Sally Rooney, Jennifer Down, Siri Hustvedt and André Aciman (Call Me By Your Name).

Hetty and Ness, best friends since childhood, have left suburban Melbourne for the first time to live abroad. Hetty is charming and captivating, the life of the party. Ness is a wallflower, hopelessly in love with her. In the student quarter of Toronto, the pair take a room in a share house full of self-assured creatives. Hetty disappears into barkeeping work and a whirlwind nightlife, while Ness drifts aimlessly.

But when Ness finds Hope one day in the art gallery, an intense affair develops. There are new friends, too, and a job: at last her life starts to make some sense. And Hetty’s starts spectacularly to fall apart, in a mess of bad drugs and bad men.

As winter freezes the lakeside city, the dark undercurrents of Hetty’s character—abusive relationships, a dangerous obsession with bodies of water—become ever stronger. Ness may lose the person she loves more than anyone else in the world.

Beautifully written and intimate, Cherry Beach is a revelatory story of friendship and desire.

Cherry Beach

On the cusp of thirty, Coral learns that a thing is growing inside her body. It is not necessarily a complete disaster, she tells herself. I’m okay, she tells herself. Soon the thing inside her is the size of a plum. ‘Little Plum,’ she says, ‘Little Plum, I love you.’ And she wants to love it, the little plum. It’s just that she can’t yet think of it as what it is becoming: a baby, and not just a piece of fruit. Coral is tapping and shrugging more than usual. She is trying to stop the creature in her head from taking hold. Coral might not be okay—or she might be seeing more clearly than anyone. Bold and sensuous, Little Plum is the stunning follow-up to Laura McPhee-Browne’s award-winning debut, Cherry Beach.

Little Plum

On the cusp of thirty, Coral learns that a thing is growing inside her body. It is not necessarily a complete disaster, she tells herself. I’m okay, she tells herself. Soon the thing inside her is the size of a plum. ‘Little Plum,’ she says, ‘Little Plum, I love you.’ And she wants to love it, the little plum. It’s just that she can’t yet think of it as what it is becoming: a baby, and not just a piece of fruit. Coral is tapping and shrugging more than usual. She is trying to stop the creature in her head from taking hold. Coral might not be okay—or she might be seeing more clearly than anyone. Bold and sensuous, Little Plum is the stunning follow-up to Laura McPhee-Browne’s award-winning debut, Cherry Beach. Laura McPhee-Browne is a writer and social worker living in Melbourne, on Wurundjeri land. Her short stories have been published widely in Australia. Cherry Beach (2020), her first novel, won a NSW Premier’s Literary Award. ‘The debut of Melbourne-based Laura McPhee-Browne is a poetic, languid, melancholic and sensitive meditation on trying to carve your own path in that liminal period between the freedom of childhood and the responsibilities of adulthood.’ Age on Cherry Beach ‘Cherry Beach is a tender and bruising coming-of-age novel. McPhee-Browne’s writing is both poetic and economical, finely attuned to the exhilaration and doom of youth, unfamiliar cities and new relationships.’ Miles Franklin Award-winner Jennifer Down on Cherry Beach Australian audiences may not often encounter in their local fiction...Lusciously evocative prose...Another queer woman hero to add to the slim but beloved catalogue scrounged from Australian literature’s meagre offerings.’ Meanjin on Cherry Beach

Laura McPhee-Browne

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