Ismael, a transplanted Singaporean, lives on a bucolic suburban Brisbane street. His job is to decide whether asylum-seekers get to stay in the country, a dilemma that never fails to remind him of his own immigrant status. But then his life begins to take on the hue of a nightmare: his neighbour inexplicably commits suicide, his wife dies of cancer, his daughter abandons him for the United States, and his Siamese cat goes missing.
In Lau Siew Mei's new novel, an enclosed Australian neighbourhood becomes a microcosm of a world increasingly hostile towards migrants.