Worry Doll

by Laura McPhee-Browne

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.

Kindle Edition

Expected publication June 30, 2026

Reviews

[chloe · Rating 4 out of 5]

give me a book about queer obsession with an unreliable narrator and i am so there. i went into this relatively blind, my only understanding of the plot being that it follows the affair between two women who meet by chance on a train in melbourne. i don’t often pay too much attention to epigraphs in books, but the choice to have a quote from beverly farmer’s ‘alone’ really struck me having only read that book two or three months ago. it feels incredibly fitting for a novel that similarly follows a woman’s slow spiral as the result of a lesbian relationship. the second half of the book, written from the perspective of the younger, less involved woman in the dynamic really changed my understanding of the ‘truth’ of the other woman’s perspective, which is the first one we are given.