Megan Cheong

Dec 5, 2024 | meanjin.com.au | Megan Cheong

Reviewed: The Burrow, Melanie Cheng, TextIn Kafka’s unfinished story ‘The Burrow’, a badger-like creature recounts its increasingly paranoid efforts to defend its home against invasion. In Melanie Cheng’s novel of the same name, disaster has already invaded the home with the sudden death of six-month-old Ruby. Four years on, Jin, Amy and their remaining daughter, Lucie, persist in a holding pattern of barely suppressed grief.

Aug 27, 2024 | meanjin.com.au | Megan Cheong

Reviewed: If You Go, Alice Robinson, Affirm PressA woman ‘comes to’ in darkness, eyelids and mouth taped shut, thoughts leaden and lagging. A second woman tends to the first, rubbing life back into her cold limbs in a grotesque pantomime of birth. Even as Esther’s awareness of the world around her grows, her thoughts compulsively circle back to her children, Wolfie and Clare. ‘Where am I?’ she asks Grace after her breathing tube has been removed.

May 29, 2024 | meanjin.com.au | Megan Cheong

Reviewed: Ghost Cities, Siang Lu, UQPFrom the first page, Ghost Cities is a novel built on shifting ground. The portentous introduction of Imperial heir Lu Huang Du as a youth who knows himself to be ‘Exceptional’ is immediately undercut by the decidedly unexceptional image of him ‘gawping’ as his ‘purple-faced’ father chokes to death on a chicken bone.

Nov 8, 2023 | liminalmag.com | Megan Cheong

For a few months, Sally Olds’s People Who Lunch was so omnipresent that a writing friend and I began referring to it simply as ‘The Shoe’. I’m thinking about going to the salon with the author of The Shoe if you’re interested? Just went on a date with a man who was also reading The Shoe. Close to a year later, The Shoe remains firmly wedged in the door of my consciousness.

Oct 30, 2023 | meanjin.com.au | Megan Cheong

Reviewed: Gunflower, Laura Jean McKay, ScribeIf pressed, I would describe Laura Jean McKay’s Gunflower as a collection of stories about bodies. Divided into three sections—‘birth’, ‘life’ and ‘death’—the stories explore the way bodies, with all their needs and desires, are controlled, exploited and disregarded. Yet I like that this doesn’t quite get to the heart of them, that these stories don’t fit together as neatly as that.