Jumana Bayeh's The Literature of the Lebanese Diaspora appears alongside two other 2015 studies which deal likewise with the significance of place in contemporary Lebanese literature: Ghenwa Hayek's Beirut, Imagining the City: Space and Place in Lebanese Literature (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015) and Samira Aghacy's Mappings of the City in the Modern Arabic Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). Unlike these works, Bayeh's is not concerned with changing portrayals of Beirut, or any other capital, in tandem with historical events, but rather with the location of place, physically and mentally, with its symbolism and possible connections to the sentiment of “homeness” in foreign-language diasporic Lebanese novels written within a decade (1999–2009). However, the organizing principle here is neither chronological nor geographical but directional and relational. The critic's aim is to furnish a more liberal and thus a flexible conception of diaspora both in and via this corpus by zeroing in on displacement resulting from two hallmarks of Lebanese history, culture, and literature: war and migration.

Following an introduction that reviews and critiques seminal studies on diasporic writing, Bayeh's book is divided into three parts: “War and the City,” “Home, Mobility, Immobility,” and “Contesting the Nation-State.” Each section has its introduction, in chapter form, which sets the theoretical framework and historical background for discussing the novels that follow. Findings are generalized in short conclusions for each of the chapters dealing with individual texts. The number of postwar authors and texts selected is five. With the exception of Francophone Amin Maalouf, whose Ports of Call (London: Random House, 1999) occupies the last part, four Anglophone writers are paired off in the first two: Tony Hanania and Rawi Hage, then Nada Awar Jarrar and Alia Yunis. Interestingly, although the book's main focus remains place—whether that be conceived as cities around the world, homes-as-houses, and/or nation-states—with much less attention given to gender and age, the authors ‘housed’ in each part share both of these criteria and more. Hanania and Hage were born in 1964 and lived through segments of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), a fact that had a huge impact on their early novels, Unreal City (London: Bloomsbury, 1999) and De Niro's Game (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2006). Jarrar and Yunis are older but also close in age. Maalouf, born in 1949, is the oldest in this ‘group’ and, like the two women novelists, did not experience the mayhem. What ties these narratives is what Bayeh takes into consideration as her guiding principle, namely the “diasporic condition of the authors—a sensibility that is doubled, decentered and dislocated” and how it “actively reconstructs and contests essentialist definitions of place” (p. 26). This is why, as explained in the conclusion, she did not emphasize character development. Instead, place is the protagonist throughout.

An arsenal of historical, political, sociological, and theological sources, in addition to literary criticism—the latter ranging from lengthy studies (in many instances of postwar Anglophone Lebanese fiction) to book reviews—informs Bayeh's close and incisive readings. It is refreshing to see how she complements, modifies, and even contradicts theses advanced by scholars of diaspora and home studies as well as of Lebanese fictional prose. In each chapter, Bayeh forges a new twist to existing interpretations by resorting to discourses of Lebanon's religions, folklore, demography, and others, thus situating each text in a specific historical context.

In Part I, Beirut is war-torn and divided by the (in)famous Green Line separating the Muslim western from the Christian eastern sector. Here, sociological treatises by Max Weber and George Simmel (the German School), Robert Park and Louis Wirth (the Chicago School) are invoked, respectively, to read the broken city in both novels. In Hanania's novel, capitalism's exploitative and dehumanizing nature is shown to be thriving not only in the western sector during the war but also in the postwar Solidere downtown reconstruction project which the text's events do not include but was well under way when Unreal City was published. T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland is emphasized as an intertext for the depiction of urban devastation. In De Niro's Game, the Phalange-dominated East Beirut is shaped by its militant characters and becomes just as alienating as West Beirut. Thus, Bayeh demonstrates how both novels denounce moral corruption and religious fanaticism. In Part II, Bayeh offers alternative readings of Jarrar's Somewhere, Home (London: William Heinemann, 2003), mainly in conjunction with Jacques Derrida's notions about archives, and of Yunis’ The Night Counter (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2009), to deliver contrasting images of home embedded, respectively, in stasis and mobility. In Part III, partly based on Edward Said's views on exile and the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, Bayeh illustrates how Maalouf's novel rejects essentialist views of a homeland, offering instead a model of Levantine coexistence.

Jumana Bayeh's study is eclectic in its choice of novels yet exhaustive in its incorporation of critical sources and theories. The sequence of texts and the emphases placed on certain aspects therein resemble the act of zooming out while reading a map. The argument made—and cleverly restated in the conclusion's title by reversing the order of the terms “diaspora literature” and “place” which was the introduction’s—presents an original and a persuasive intervention in diaspora as well as in contemporary Lebanese literature studies. Anyone interested in Middle Eastern and postcolonial studies and/or in Arab modern cultural and political history will enjoy and learn from this well-written and clearly argued contribution. The endnotes, fifteen-page bibliography, and index display thoroughness and accuracy. The only thing the reader will find missing is a sense of Bayeh's own academic growth as there is no mention anywhere of any other published work by this emergent bright scholar. Apart from very few typographical errors and some repetition, this intelligent and sophisticated work is highly recommended for undergraduate and graduate students, scholars, and intellectually curious readers who, either in the process or as a result of their reading, are likely to reposition themselves vis-à-vis these complex critical and actual terrains.