We arrived on a Tuesday, I can remember that. I can remember Hetty’s hand in mine as we moved slowly down the steps of the escalator, as if standing completely still would have been harder than moving.
Hetty and Ness, best friends since childhood, have left suburban Melbourne for the first time to live abroad. Hetty is charming and captivating, the life of the party. Ness is a wallflower, hopelessly in love with her. In the student quarter of Toronto, the pair take a room in a share house full of self-assured creatives. Hetty disappears into barkeeping work and a whirlwind nightlife, while Ness drifts aimlessly.
But when Ness finds Faith one day in the art gallery, an intense affair develops. There are new friends, too, and a job: at last her life starts to make some sense. And Hetty’s starts spectacularly to fall apart, in a mess of bad drugs and bad men.
As winter freezes the lakeside city, the dark undercurrents of Hetty’s character-abusive relationships, a dangerous obsession with bodies of water-become ever stronger. Ness may lose the person she loves more than anyone else in the world.
Beautifully written and intimate, Cherry Beach is a revelatory story of friendship and desire.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 240
Imprint: Text Aust
Publication date: 04/02/2020
Cherry Beach
by Laura McPhee-Browne
Review by Rosa
Beautiful and hopeful and sad yet strangely comforting, ‘Cherry Beach’ is a quick but intense read about friendship, love, and death. Best friends Hetty and Ness perfectly highlight the best and worst parts of being young and alive; the joys and the fears, the hopes and the heartbreak, and all the monotony in between. Also contains wonderful representation of queer women who are allowed to just exist without being sexualised, romanticised, villainised, or forced into the spotlight. Thank you Laura McPhee-Browne; I loved every moment of it.
Cherry Beach
by Laura McPhee-Browne
Review by Sarah
I adored this achingly beautiful book and cannot stop thinking about it. Mcphee-Browne trudges up an array of emotions without ever becoming pretentious, creating the most perceptive and vulnerable novel in all the places I least expected it. McPhee-Browne most certainly left some bruises on my heart. The complexity of female friendships is piercingly portrayed and made for an easily devourable tale. It engulfed me and I enjoyed every moment.
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