Room for a Stranger is Melanie Cheng's follow-up to the prize-winning Australia Day. She has been lauded as “astonishingly deft and incisive” by Christos Tsiolkas and “sharp and sympathetic” by Jennifer Down. She speaks with Ailsa Piper about a novel that unfolds the seemingly ordinary lives of an elderly woman and struggling student living under the same roof to reveal the complex and important truths about connection and home.