The Burrow

‘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

A small pet rabbit takes on greater meaning in this tight, elegant story of a family quartet reckoning with grief. Melanie Cheng captures the claustrophobic, revelatory strangeness of the early days of the COVID lockdown while bravely mining complexities of human emotion—fear, guilt, anger, and love—in lovely, lucid prose that glitters throughout with cut stones of wisdom.

Lauren Acampora, author of The Paper Wasp

The Burrow’s restrained prose and heartbreaking honesty capture the paradox of living with trauma, where the smallest of daily interactions are often the most debilitating. Yet despite dealing with such weighty material, The Burrow is an engrossing, compulsive, and uplifting read—a testimony to Cheng’s mastery of style and keen insight into human nature.

Rajia Hassib, author of In the Language of Miracles

‘Such a fan of Melanie Cheng’s work. Quiet writing with such fierce emotion. This one’s another gift of a novel.’

Benjamin Law

‘Beautifully capture[s] the intensity of living in close quarters…A tender story of grief, hope and a pet rabbit.’

Justine Hyde, Saturday Paper, Best Books of 2024

‘Melanie Cheng’s tender novella has stayed with me since I read it in a single setting…This book describes so much about how grief can push us apart then pull us back together; and the relationship between Lucie and Pauline is so warmly, vividly drawn that I couldn’t shake it.’

Steph Harmon, Guardian, Best Books of 2024

‘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

‘This beautifully contained and elegant novel resulted in me gasping for air…A gift.’

Chris Gordon, Readings

‘The Burrow…skilfully brings coherence to its explorations of compassion, commitment, and suffering.’

Booklist

‘[There’s] an incredible humanity in being a doctor, an incredible ability to read people…[The Burrow is] very moving, very beautifully done…Really admire this one.’

Claire Nichols, ABC RN Breakfast

‘On the surface, [The Burrow] is a very quiet, understated book; but of course there is a lot going on beneath that surface, down in the burrow…Definitely recommended.’

Through the Biblioscope

‘A triumph of restrained and tender storytelling…A nuanced study of one family’s grief, but it’s also a magnificent portrait of modern loneliness.’

Books+Publishing

‘An absolutely beautiful book…It might be my novel of the year.’

Michael Williams, ABC RN The Bookshelf

‘Gathers a delicate balance of modernity and the past...A quiet novel with moments that feel like they could explode…Reminds us how quickly life can change in an instant, whether you are a human or a rabbit.’

Book Muse

‘The feeling one gets when reading The Burrow echoes its title: one feels held and safe, as if one is in the hands of someone who knows exactly what they are doing.’

Saturday Paper

‘An elegant, tender story of grief, hope—and a pet rabbit...The narrative is deftly structured to reveal, gradually, the history of the family, while also analysing the minds and souls of its members with tenderness and compassion.’

Age

‘Cheng’s prose is simple and unadorned, but cuts directly to the heart of things: a single sentence can expose a world of truth.’

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