Like so many of her subjects, Gonsalves, who herself moved to Sydney for university in the 1990s, is originally from Mumbai and is of Goan Catholic background. These parallels shouldn’t matter, but are hard to ignore in the author’s complex and tender attention to detail in so many of her characters with similar trajectories. American author Jhumpa Lahiri is the obvious comparison, though that may discount Gonsalves’s distinctive vantage point and approach, rich in empathy even for some of the book’s most tragically flawed characters. (Also unmistakable, among all the talk of migration and resettlement, is the author’s profound respect for Australia’s First Peoples.)

‘A.K. Ramanujan had once said that a story is cathartic for the teller in the tale,’ she writes in the aptly named ‘The Teller in the Tale’. Whether or not this is true for Gonsalves, The Permanent Resident and its tales of newness and belonging, of shifting privileges, and of identity across borders is certainly valuable, if not cathartic, for anyone keen to breathe in their surroundings with a fresh pair of lungs.