Housing is a fundamental issue that is bound up with many dimensions of personal life and its intersection with social, environmental, economic and political contexts. Housing could be taken as a conduit for understanding the complexity of social relations in late modernity. Yet housing has not had this central role in the social sciences, more often scholarship on housing has focussed on policy rather than practice. In writing this book, the authors are seeking to provide a fresh perspective on the relationships between housing and the life course, and to reveal the complexity of these processes. The book draws on the authors’ own empirical analysis of the Australian Housing Survey, but integrates this with other research and draws on scholarship from the US and UK to broaden the scope of the text.

The first substantive chapter of the book outlines the authors’ conceptual framework and makes the case for a lifecourse transitions approach to housing. In setting out this conceptual framework, the authors discuss the merits and drawbacks of other approaches, including housing histories, careers and pathways. The advantage of a transitions approach is that while it suggests change and mobility, the direction, origins and destinations associated with this movement are more plural. There is a normative interpretation of housing careers in particular that is increasingly restrictive in late modernity as personal lives become more fractured, and analyses of housing needs to take this into account. After making the case for a transitions approach, the structure of the book takes the concept of the lifecourse and discusses major events and transitions in turn, though this is proceeded by an analysis of recent developments in housing policy and provision, and the book concludes with two chapters on disability and economic restructuring. Thus, the authors’ development of the concept of the life course as applied to housing contextualises this with respect to policy and social identities.

The chapter on housing policy and provision outlines the main interventions and economic factors that have shaped housing in the UK, US and Australia since the 1970s. Much of this recent history is well known and the chapter focuses on the current economic crisis and the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market, particularly in the US. I found the detail in this chapter fascinating, though I did find it difficult to follow what actually had happened in the US. This is the main message to take from this chapter, that housing is more than just a particular branch of social policy but is intricately tied up with the complexities of global finance. The relevance of these momentous financial and political manoeuvres for housing transitions is that the complexity of individual life course transitions is set against an increasingly diverse and complex housing sector.

The three empirical chapters on life course transitions deal with youth, mid-life and later life in turn. Of these three chapters, I found the latter two more stimulating, partly because the concept of life course is now well embedded in youth studies and thus the chapter on youth presents quite familiar themes around the diversity of youth housing transitions and its relevance for wider transitions to adulthood. The discussion on mid-life seeks to challenge the assumption that this is a time for stability in most people's lives. Rather the authors explore the tensions between consolidation and risk and identify other key events that impact on housing transitions, particularly partnership dissolution, job loss, disability and ill health. This is a useful discussion as it addresses the tension between generational and social change which is a key theme of life course research. While we might anticipate that younger generations have to negotiate housing in a time of risk, it is less clear how these social transformations are impacting on older generations who may be assumed to be more insulated from these changes. This has certainly been an important theme in recent UK public discourse about generational justice. This theme of uncertainly and change is carried forward into the discussion of later life, again the authors are covering more familiar ground here but, drawing mostly on Australian data, do highlight how later life is becoming more heterogeneous in terms of housing and that this reflects both life course events and social identities.

The chapters on disability and economic restructuring certainly add to the theme of complexity which is developed throughout the book. There are two highlights, first I appreciated the paradox revealed in the discussion of disability: that disabled people are more likely to have housing that does not meet their needs, but are also more reluctant to move as they fear they might lose what limited services and support they have in their current location. The authors’ discussion of economic restructuring challenges Oswald's assertion that ownership is damaging to the economy as it inhibits mobility (Oswald, Reference Oswald1997). Drawing on case studies in both the UK and Australia, the authors demonstrate the importance of local economic factors and political interventions that effectively undermine the possibility of a unified relationship between housing provision and the wider economy.

Overall, this is a well written and accessible book and I should add that I found the figures to illustrate some of the main points informative and clearly drawn. It brings together some important empirical evidence and a conceptual framework that could certainly advance scholarship on housing transitions. There are three aspects that are missing from the text. First the concept of the life course is very much an individual one, and more could be said about the complexity of shared experiences. For example, the life course in this book starts with leaving home and there is no mention of childhood experiences, but children do move not only with parents but also between parental homes. The authors’ focus on adults does assume that the figure of the atomised individual is the main social actor. Second, the focus on housing does not really capture the materiality of the subject, that is housing itself remains a shell rather than a lived in space and synergies with literature on home spaces could, I think, add to this focus on housing transitions. Finally, more attention could be given to intersectionality, for example discussions of disability also need to take into account class, gender and ethnicity. Overall, these omissions do not detract from the quality of the book, but are may be possibilities for future scholarship and development of the framework that is established in this text.