Beautifully capturing the emotional complexity of impending motherhood, Little Plum is a rich and vital story from a rising star in Australian fiction
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 fruity morsel.
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, dark and sensuous, Little Plum is the stunning follow-up to the award-winning debut Cherry Beach. With skill and sensitivity, Laura McPhee-Browne takes us inside the mind of an expectant mother.
About the Author
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.
Industry Reviews
'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
'Reading McPhee-Browne feels like listening to your own heartbeat.' - Amanda Lohrey
'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
'An embodied and magical novel-so dark and earthy, colourful and frightening.' -Ellena Savage
'A poetic and razor-sharp portrait of motherhood.' - Harper's Bazaar
'[Laura McPhee-Browne] does especially well [in portraying] the coexistence of...parental love with an ongoing, often frightening battle with mental illness. It is depicted not as something to fix but something to understand and live with.' -Saturday Paper
