This volume sets out to examine the “impact of moving from one language to another on the notions of self and community” (xi.) and the significance of language for tradition and sense of belonging. The first two chapters are designed to introduce the research. In Ch. 1, Nic Craith announces her research object, that is, migrant writers and their “in-between” experience with language. She limits the study to European contexts, focusing on still alive European-continent-born migrant writers with strong engagement in multiple language experiences. In Ch. 2, the author outlines the methodological framework and discusses some attendant theoretical issues. Her methodological approach integrates life-narrative interviews, memoir and biography reading, and ethnographic fieldwork. Theoretically, she is concerned with in what sense life narratives are authentic and how memory is linked with language.

Ch. 3 examines “the relationship between words, expressions and people in different languages and places” (49). Language, she demonstrates, is significant not only in influencing the ways people understand and interact with landscape, but also in shaping their worldviews and being in the place. Language “is also the world of home” (60), to which we belong. Different languages are like in different worlds. Migrants need to learn not only words, but also ways of living in the world. Ch. 4 moves to “the web of family relationships.” Mother tongue is perhaps the most important issue at stake. As Nic Craith illustrates through migrant writers' narratives, this is not always a single entity, but a “multi-varied, multi-dimensional concept” (77). Closely linked with the mother figure, or sometimes the grandmother, the mother tongue is just as significant in shaping our attitude towards life. For these immigrant writers, father may be no less important, so the author deals also with the “father tongue.” The language divide between the migrant parents and children, however, has an impact on their relationship. When children become experts in the new language, the parent and child roles can be reversed. In Ch.5, Nic Craith addresses three interesting phenomena related to migrant writers' change of language environment: inner dialogue, name change, and silence. These things break the past from the present and generate “a separation of the immigrant from his or her narrative heritage” (117). They might be moments of painful loss for some, but for others, they may also mean joy, liberation, or creativity. Ch. 6 focuses on immigrants' nonverbal communication and mimicry in the new cultural contexts, discussing issues of cultural pattern learning and sense of belonging. Body-language and behavioral habitus, including the use of cultural space, pose big challenges, as the immigrant writers reveal, to assimilating in the host society. The art of mimicry helps in one way or other, but it inevitably involves the concealment or even elimination of former life, which is not always successful. Struggles of identity and belonging are always with migrants. Ch. 7 explores the influences of interculturality upon the immigrant writers both as individuals and as authors. From a traditional biblical perspective, the split of languages among humankind was a curse from God. It can also be a blessing, however. The immigrant writers may be chosen by a language other than their mother tongues, and, for them, there may also be “a third tongue,” a language that is neither the mother tongue or the adopted language, but a cultural syncretism of the two. Such intercultuarility engenders unique vision and creativity.

The study presented in the book is interesting for its interdisciplinary or, more precisely, transdisciplinary outlook and the insightful stories that may be creatively re-interpreted by different readers/scholars. It thus contributes not only to such fields as (linguistic or literary) anthropology and second-language acquisition, but is also a very enlightening source for literary studies, diaspora studies, (cross-) cultural studies, place studies, translation studies, language philosophy, and so on.