Description

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A wise and moving story about a family navigating grief, hope, and healing through a bond with a new pet rabbit.

“How rare, this delicacy—this calm, sweet, desolated wisdom.”—Helen Garner

The Burrow follows members of the Lee family as they navigate grief and hope in their quiet Australian suburb: Jin, an emergency physician and father; Amy, a published author and mother; Lucie, their bookish and introverted ten-year-old; and Pauline, Amy’s mother who’s trying to make amends. Racked with grief for Ruby—Lucie’s baby sister who died in a shocking accident—the family adopts a rabbit in the hopes of bringing much-needed cheer to their home. At first, each family member benefits from the distraction of a new and needy creature, but when a violent home invasion breaks their fragile sense of peace, the family is forced to confront the terrible circumstances surrounding Ruby’s death.



Atmospheric and tautly lyrical, Melanie Cheng’s slim novel brings together four distinct perspectives—and one wide-eyed rabbit—to reveal the enormity of loss, long-buried family secrets, and how to survive in a newfound world after the ultimate tragedy.

About the Author

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Melanie Cheng is an award-winning author and doctor based in Melbourne, Australia. Her writing has been published in the Guardian, The Age, The Saturday Paper, and The Big Issue, among many others.

Praise For…

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How rare, this delicacy—this calm, sweet, desolated wisdom.
— Helen Garner

The Borrow’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

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