Shortlisted, 2025 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction
Shortlisted, 2025 Stella Prize
Shortlisted, 2025 Age Book of the Year
Shortlisted, 2025 ABIA Small Publishers’ Adult Book of the Year
Shortlisted, 2025 ALS Gold Medal
Longlisted, 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award
“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
“A wonderful, engrossing novel.” —Michael Williams, Read This podcast
“The book you should be reading…A heart-rending tale…Suffused with love and care.” —Qantas Magazine
“Cheng’s prose is simple and unadorned, but cuts directly to the heart of things: a single sentence can expose a world of truth.” —Big Issue
“Cheng is a technically clever writer, maintaining [a] pleasing forward motion and light touch. That’s the true success of the book…Managing to draw out the ordinary everyday tragedies…It’s good writing that knows where it’s going, an increasingly rare quality.” —ABC Radio National: The Bookshelf
“Melanie Cheng understands ordinary people—their love, their quiet desperation, their hope—and the restrained, elegant prose of The Burrow is testament to this. The novel is slim and each word is carefully chosen. It feels as if every sentence is a distillation…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
“My favourite book of the year…Beautifully written. It’s funny, it’s very, very moving, and it’s a beautifully finished novel.” —Jason Steger, ABC RN The Bookshelf, 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, Best Books of 2024, Guardian
“Best novel I read all year. And I read some great novels this year. A slender work of such composure and grace and humanity…It’s superb.” —Annabel Crabb
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