The Burrow (Melanie Cheng, Text)

A triumph of restrained and tender storytelling, Melanie Cheng’s The Burrow follows a Melbourne family living on autopilot five years after a senseless tragedy. Amy, Jin and Lucie have since each developed their own coping strategies: Amy has emotionally withdrawn and is unable to work on her next book; Jin, her husband, has become superstitious and possibly unfaithful; and Lucie, their isolated daughter, struggles with intrusive thoughts of a violent nature. Their dynamic subtly shifts when Amy and Jin get Lucie a pet rabbit to keep her company at the same time as Amy’s mother, Pauline, comes to stay. The rabbit, named Fiver after a character in Watership Down and whom Pauline and Lucie bond over, becomes a symbol for the long-unspoken tensions in the family and a prism refracting their anxieties. In this way, The Burrow recalls the similarly meditative novel The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. Both works explore how pets reflect our inner selves in mysterious and existentially fraught ways while gifting us much-needed levity and sweetness. The Burrow is a nuanced study of one family’s grief, but it’s also a magnificent portrait of modern loneliness. Through the alternating points of view of her well-defined characters, Cheng (Room for a Stranger, Australia Day) evokes how we get stuck in lonely orbits around each other and charts with well-earned hope one family’s slow progress back toward a common world again.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Melissa Mantle is a bookseller with a master's degree in literature. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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