Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei have produced a study with ambitious breadth. Beginning in the 1920s with T. S. Eliot's typist in The Waste Land and finishing in the present day, and spanning literature, drama, and film, the essays in this volume take us through a social history of Britain reflected in transient living spaces.

The need for single rooms in shared lodgings underwent significant growth at the end of the nineteenth century to cater to an increasingly urban and mobile population. As towns and cities continued to expand without additional housing provision, former genteel family homes were subdivided and turned into lodgings. Boarding houses and bedsits rapidly increased in numbers following the Great War, and the slow rebuilding after the Second World War further exacerbated housing shortages. In their introduction, Briganti and Mezei discuss how the objects in these rooms, the “stuff” of the boarding house or bedsit—often broken, shabby furniture and things the landlord has thrown away—point “to the lodgers’ deracinated status, their powerlessness and the sheer ephemerality of their existence to date” (7).

Their first, co-written chapter, “Aspidistras and Divans,” named after the ubiquitous boarding house plant, has impressive scope: Briganti and Mezei gallop through examples of boarding house and bedsit novels set in London from the 1920s to 1940s. Their next chapter on the “cold rooms” of the postwar London novel is perhaps the most interesting. Briganti and Mezei examine the bedsit dwelling of the postwar period as a political space in the climate of austerity and immigration from the commonwealth, and they demonstrate how racism and other forms of discrimination are played out in narratives of the cheap, cold world of London bedsit life. They consider writers from Laura Del-Rivo and Doris Lessing to V. S. Naipaul and Sam Selvon, arguing that the rooms they depict express “the unsettled condition of modernity” (111).

The gendered nature of boarding house and bedsit life is significant. In her chapter “Life and Still Life in the Bedsits of Bloomsbury,” Hana Leaper offers a positive perspective on these spaces for women artists, arguing that “bedsit culture provided a sense of community, and an opportunity to develop a resilient artistic identity” (59). Focusing on the artists Emily Carr (who produced autobiographical art about boarding house life), Vanessa Bell, and Nina Hamnett, Leaper argues that shared living spaces allowed these artists to cultivate a new model of domesticity outside prescribed family and gender roles where “[l]ife and still life were recreated in startling synthesis as new modes of living and painting emerged” (45). Vanessa Bell was not a dweller of bedsits or boarding houses, nor did she live with strangers, but Leaper makes a convincing case for her inclusion as an artist (and a facilitator of other women artists) who continually challenged conventional models of domesticity.

“Living in a bedsitter meant replacing a family of origin with a family of choice, or chance” (64), and Paul Delany explores the bedsit world of 1950s and 1960s Britain through the work of Muriel Spark and Doris Lessing, who both used their experiences of communal living for their fiction. The single room often enabled the development of social and sexual relations that would have been frowned upon within the family home. Mark Armstrong's “In a Queer Room” examines the important role of the single rented room as “a challenge to sexual and domestic norms” (76) in the lives of queer men in the twentieth century and “all the contrary freedoms and circumscription it symbolizes” (83). Covering representations in novels, poetry, and memoir, Armstrong also points out the complexities of intersections between sexuality, race, and class.

The house full of strangers is the perfect closed world for a plot of mystery and intrigue. Jane Sturrock analyzes the classic detective novel as written by Margery Allingham with her astute social observation, Agatha Christie, and Ngaio Marsh to examine how these writers exploited the domestic spaces of their settings. Michael Newton, by contrast, looks at representations of boarding house life in film, in particular the “slippery protagonist” (91) of the criminal lodger in the Ealing comedies. Newton argues that the films “posit a world in which crime mimics the relations structured in the lodging experience” (91). In the postwar world of home ownership, there is no longer room for the lodger, and Newton explores the nuanced relationships generated among criminal lodgers, their landladies, and the other tenants.

The final two chapters bring the volume up to date and examine what “living with strangers” means in today's world. In “Precarious Living in the Films of Ken Loach,” Luke Davies points out that Loach is described as a “chronicler of working-class culture” (145), yet his films feature characters who mainly do not work. Davies argues that ideas of working-class culture have shifted with the creation of a “precariat” (145) class, “distinguishable for its lack of identity, its disconnectedness” (145), and that these traits are reflected and embodied in the temporary, unaffordable, housing in which they live. The collection closes with “Leave to Remain,” Emily Cuming's examination of temporary accommodation, such as bed and breakfasts and asylum hotels, in contemporary fictions of asylum and forced migration. Cuming demonstrates how “far from being marginal or peripheral … these everyday housing forms are in fact bound up with some of the most pressing political and social issues of the day” (162), making this an excellent closure to the collection.

The fascinating essays in this volume bring new ideas to current discussions of home and changing housing conditions. However, at times it seems the volume's scope is too broad: cataloguing examples of bedsits and boarding houses or justifying how works exemplify living with strangers sometimes requires space that might better be used for deeper analysis of the cultural implications. Nonetheless, taken together, the writers demonstrate that there are many different forms of “living with strangers” and that the meanings of temporary living spaces, particularly in relation to gender, race, class, sexuality, and politics, continue to change over time.