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.
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‘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.’
" - The Saturday Paper
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‘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.’
" - ABC News
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‘An unflinching, unnerving, exquisitely observed double portrait of human longing and discordance.’
" - Miles Allinson, author of
In Moonland"
‘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.’
" - Books+Publishing
