Melanie Cheng’s characters tend to be untethered and out of place. In her short story collection Australia Day (2017), which won the Victorian premier’s literary award for fiction, the author introduced various people navigating disconnection. And in her debut novel, Room for a Stranger (2019), two adrift, solitary souls form an unexpected friendship. This interest in separation, in the ways we isolate from and reconnect to one another, persists in Cheng’s new novel, The Burrow.
This is a story of familial tensions, parenthood and grief in the wake of trauma, condensed into a novella. Set in Melbourne at the tail end of the pandemic lockdowns, when curfews are lifting but restrictions remain, it is told from the alternating perspectives of married couple Amy and Jin Lee, their 10-year-old daughter, Lucie, and Amy’s somewhat estranged mother, Pauline. This is a loving yet wounded family, each differently marred by an incomprehensible tragedy that occurred four years prior: the accidental drowning of Amy and Jin’s six-month-old baby, Ruby.
