In July this year, Siang Lu’s second novel, Ghost Cities, was announced as the winner of the 2025 Miles Franklin award, the most prestigious literary award in Australia. The fact that this is the first time the award has gone to a work by a Chinese Australian writer, and that three of the six short-listed works were by Asian Australians, testifies to the shift that has taken place in Australian literature and culture over the last thirty or so years, from Anglo-dominated to more accurately reflecting the current composition of the nation’s population. It also prompts a rethinking of the role of diasporic authors and texts within the national literature, their reading of Australia, their connection to homelands and their perspective on diasporic culture itself. In this paper I first consider diasporic fiction as reading practice: a cross-cultural lens trained on the cultural coordinates of the authors’ experience and imagination. I move on to the reading of diasporic fiction, particularly to the very different readings produced by readers in the author’s home country, host nation or in the diaspora. My reading of Ghost Cities, a genre-defying, tradition-defying firecracker of a novel, will serve throughout to illustrate my argument.