Michelle de Kretser, the Sri Lankan-born Australian writer, constructs two interlocking narratives that examine how race, gender, and time shape the experiences of migrants. The first half follows Lili, a young Sri Lankan Australian teaching English in 1980s France, observing the casual racism of her students while pursuing an affair with a married man and cultivating a fantasy life drawn from French cinema. The second half jumps to a near-future Australia where an aging Lili faces a society that has banned Islam and turned explicitly hostile to immigrants. The two narratives mirror and comment on each other, showing how the same person encounters different forms of exclusion across decades and continents. De Kretser writes with precise attention to the daily humiliations and occasional pleasures of living as an outsider, avoiding both victimhood narratives and assimilation success stories. The speculative elements of the near-future section extrapolate from current political trends without becoming didactic or losing the texture of lived experience. The book examines how racism operates differently for women than men, how it intersects with ageism, and how migrants carry multiple national identities that others refuse to recognize. Readers will find here fiction that illuminates the migrant experience through specific characters while raising broader questions about belonging, exclusion, and what the future might hold.