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
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.
Be warned, dear reader, you will need a box of tissues at your side as you read You Belong Here.
Emily Paull
You Belong Here tenderly gives literary shape to normal lives: the small-scale tragedies, long-running family feuds, the fleeting moments of joy, and the boredom and confusion.
Nathan Hobby
Steed has compressed an incredible story between these two covers.
Sam Van Zweden
It seems safe to assume that we’ll be hearing Steed’s name plenty more in the future.
The AU Review
It’s both fascinating and admirable the way that Steed moves seamlessly...from eldest to youngest, parent to child, focusing on the lives of each individual while still maintaining that essence of a family nucleus.
Westerly
A book that at its beginning I thought of as just another novel about a dysfunctional family surprised me with its insights, warmth, relevance to us all, and above all, its writing pizzazz. Well worth reading.
Whispering Gums
Interwoven short story collections are often at their best when they offer multiple perspectives on the same event. Laurie Steed does this well in his début novel You Belong Here, as he captures the life of a single family through the multiplicity of its members.
Australian Book Review (paywall)
