Amy, Jin and Lucie are leading isolated lives in their partially renovated, inner city home. They are not happy, but they are also terrified of change. When they buy a pet rabbit for Lucie, and then Amy's mother, Pauline, comes to stay, the family is forced to confront long-buried secrets. Will opening their hearts to the rabbit help them to heal or only invite further tragedy?
The Burrow tells an unforgettable story about grief and hope. With her characteristic compassion and eye for detail, Melanie Cheng reveals the lives of others—even of a small rabbit.
Melanie Cheng is a writer and general practitioner. She was born in Adelaide, grew up in Hong Kong and now lives in Melbourne. Her debut collection of short stories, Australia Day, won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2016 and the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction in 2018. Room for a Stranger, her highly acclaimed first novel, was published in 2019.
'How rare, this delicacy—this calm, sweet, desolated wisdom.' Helen Garner
'Melanie Cheng's The Burrow is stupendously good. This is a novel that deals with the crucial elements of our lives - love and family and grief and guilt and responsibility - and does so without a whiff of sentimentality and does so fearlessly. As in real life, the characters keep surprising us. The power of The Burrow is in the unflinching yet empathetic command of the novelist, in the candid beauty of the language. It's a remarkable work, nuanced and human and adult.' Christos Tsiolkas
'Such a fan of Melanie Cheng's work. Quiet writing with such fierce emotion. This one's another gift of a novel.' Benjamin Law
'Gulped it. I've been a Melanie Cheng fan since our first books came out. But this one is next level—it conveys so much human experience so sparingly that it seems to defy the laws of gravity. Stunning.' Sarah Krasnostein
'A tender, compelling story of family and grief...Skilful and restrained...Artfully marries her narrative's interfamilial disconnection with Covid's inextricable qualities of isolation and distance...With a soft beauty, Melanie Cheng's novel articulates quiet as stagnancy, one in which we feign security as we quarantine from ourselves and each other, down in the dark burrows of our minds.' Guardian
