When Chancey and Tommy Luu came to Australia, they believed they were building something secure for their daughters: a life safer and steadier than the one they'd left behind. But in 2005, as riots erupt across Sydney, that security has started to crack – especially when ten-year-old Fiona comes home to find the house ransacked. Only one thing is missing: a ceramic treasure chest she made at school.

As Fiona searches for answers, the burglary exposes the fault lines running through her family. Tommy clings to respectability with desperate force. Chancey is cornered by her own lies. Older sister Helen will do anything to be seen. And Ah Sim, the sharp-tongued matriarch who helped raise them all, knows what fear can do to a family. What emerges is a portrait of a household – and a nation – built on hope, denial, and the longing to belong.

Piercing and compassionate, A Great Place to Raise a Family is a novel about migration and assimilation, the fragile architecture of family, and the distance between the life we imagine and the one we actually make.