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.

LITTLE PLUM
by Laura McPhee-Browne
Text Publishing, February 2023

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.

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.