Read an extract from Worry Doll by Laura McPhee-Browne in Ramona Magazine.
‘There’s not much to look back on, there is so much. Eight years, they’ve been together, Heloise and Ernesto. She can’t remember what it was like not to know him, though he never appears in her dreams.
Eight years. I love you, said over and over, from one to the other, a comfort and a reality: a profound, precious thing. She is destroying it, and poor Ernie has no idea ...’
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.
Laura McPhee-Browne is a writer, social worker, and counsellor living in Melbourne on Wurundjeri land. Her short stories have been published widely in Australia. Her first two novels, Cherry Beach (2020) and Little Plum (2023), were published with Text Publishing to critical acclaim.
