Meerzon's dense and detailed study of the relationship between exile and artistic expression is surprising and illuminating. Drawing from the work of six exiled artists (all men, for which she makes no apologies), Meerzon shows how the émigré artist is enabled to ‘(re)establish new artistic devices, new laws, and a new language of communication in both one's everyday life and one's artistic work’ (p. 2). Rejecting the usual tropes of sadness, loss and nostalgia, identified as emerging from Said's work on exile, Meerzon paints a complex picture of the challenges and possibilities for artists in exile, whether exiled through choice or not.

Each chapter is devoted to the work of one artist and the way in which they are grouped and allowed to respond to each other adds a depth of understanding to the subject. Thus the writers Brodsky and Walcott are discussed as examples of exiles who were personally and artistically formed at the time of their exile. Theatre-maker Barba and choreographer and multimedia artist Nadj are given as examples of artists who withdrew voluntarily from their homes to work elsewhere. The final two artists, theatre-maker Mouawad and film-maker Egoyan are second-generation exiles with no choice in their exilic status whose work is more often couched in a discourse of return, for which Meerzon makes a convincing case. Each detailed account draws from a range of sources which are carefully set against psychoanalytical theory, and ideas around interculturalism and cosmopolitanism. Meerzon claims to be placing the work in a critical dialogue with Hamid Naficy's writing on the struggle of exiled artists, but Bhabha's ideas seem just as important and the frequent return to Salman Rushdie's more poetic musings on the state of exile give a sense of continuity to the writing. This is a complex view of the state of being an exile which owes as much to patterns of movement influenced by globalization as to the classic notion of the exile as an individual expelled by the state – if not more.

The book forms a useful counterpoint to notions of diasporic art whereby it is claimed that diasporic artists foreground their exilic status, making every effort to fit into the new place, speaking only to their own community. In contrast, the more privileged exile–expatriates resist assimilation, characterized by their ‘“cool detachment” from the everyday hardships of exilic being’ (p. 13). Exilic artists ‘reject the opportunity to become the chroniclers of their displaced community’ (p. 12), seeking to distance themselves from collaborative opportunities in the place of exile, preferring instead to grow in parallel with the dominant and the diasporic cultures. If I have one criticism it is the ease with which Meerzon dismisses her subjects’ fellow migrants because of their apparently less intellectual, more communal and more pragmatically driven work. However, Meerzon's argument is a provocative one and the value of this work lies in her focus on the way that ‘exile–expatriates’ shed light not only on their work but also on the work of many other artists with troubled relations to questions of home and nation.