You Belong Here
Shortlisted for the 2018 Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards.
You Belong Here is a novel about trust and connection. About what keeps us going, in spite of ourselves. About a place where we belong.
‘A little gem.’
The Herald Sun
You Belong Here
Shortlisted, 2018 Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, the Premier's prize for an emerging writer award.
Jen and Steven meet at sixteen and marry at eighteen. Soon they’re the parents of three young children.
Initially, the kids keep them together until love turns to lies and the family implodes. As they grow into adults, each child faces love and loss in the shadow of their family legacy.
You Belong Here is a book about trust and connection. About what keeps us going, in spite of ourselves.
About a place where we belong.
‘Come in. Press PLAY. Tell me what you like about this song. Shout out your dreams, cravings, obsessions from when the track starts, right through to the end. I’ll shout too, you, me, together, louder until we’re a wall of sound. We are trying to find things, people, places we love, and everything counts—songs, films, books, fathers, lovers, friends, and brothers.’
Critical praise for You Belong Here
‘Without doubt, Steed is a talent to watch.’
Joanne Shiells
‘A little gem.’
Shelly Hadfield, Herald Sun
‘Achingly beautiful.’
Nicola Berkovic, The Australian
‘Funny, sad, sensual and deeply real.’
WritingWA
‘In You Belong Here, Laurie Steed brings us the Slaters, a family with all the dysfunction of an Anne Tyler novel, but with a distinctively Australian feel. At times I felt transported back to my teenage self—music blaring, face buried in a pillow, overcome with heartache, but also rather enjoying myself.’
Melanie Cheng, Author, Australia Day and Room For a Stranger.
Winner of the 2018 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction.
UPCOMING BOOKS
Love, Dad
Written in two magical weeks in Katoomba and revised over the months that followed, Love, Dad is my debut memoir, published by Fremantle Press in 2023.
It follows an author who finds out he’s about to become a dad while facing the potential loss of his own father, who has fallen off a roof, and into a coma. From there, he learns quickly, and fails just as quickly in relation to parenting, life and his chosen career. In time, he learns what it means to be flawed but still loved as he comes to embrace his role (and himself) within his family.
Greater City Shadows
Greater City Shadows is my debut short story collection, the winner of the 2021 Henry Handel Richardson Flagship Fellowship for Short Story Writing, and was shortlisted for the 2022 Dorothy Hewett Award for an unpublished manuscript.
The Hewett Award Judges described Greater City Shadows as, ‘A beautiful collection of stories showcasing the small but magnificent ways people can find connections, set amongst one of the most isolated cities in the world. The prose is dynamic and playful, and these imperfect characters are missed each time you move on to a new tale.’