This book comes as a welcome and most needed addition to the small number of publications on fado in English by scholars such as Paul Vernon, Michael Colvin and David Cohen. But rather than debating origins, biographies of fadistas, or chronicling the demise of fado as an urban folk music, Elliott is more concerned with the dynamic processes contributing to the construction of the genre within the contemporary imagination. He therefore breaks away from traditional folkloric paradigms of music scholarship that would place the music within deterministic musical categories, such as ‘folk,’ by avoiding debates on authenticity and embracing fado's existence within the context of a local Portuguese and an international music industry. Consequently, Elliott avoids the limitations of interpreting the music solely as an expression of Portuguese culture. The author takes an approach influenced by deconstructionist thinking which examines fado as both a local and a ‘world music’ within a framework that appreciates mythology, history, memory, place, and the fragmentary way in which they are experienced through recordings.

Elliott begins by introducing the reader to the realm of ‘fadology.’ He begins with the blending of history and myth in story of the Lisbon fadista Maria Severa (1820-46); this story's influence and personification in the twentieth century by fado's most famous singer Amália Rodrigues; the music's sonic characteristics; and it's ‘mythemes’, the term used to describe common themes and stories present in fado. But once the main characteristics of the genre have been established, Elliott's narrative becomes a deeply theoretical discussion. For instance, rather than presenting suadade (the distinct and untranslatable sense of loss and yearning for the past which fado is understood to evoke) as an inherently Portuguese experience, Elliott opens out his discussion into an almost exhaustive examination of twentieth century work on loss, memory and nostalgia. Given the propensity for theory to become overly abstract, it is easy to get lost in Elliott's rich theoretical explorations. However, the author eventually concludes that fado, through both semantic and sonic devices evokes a sense of nostalgia by ‘haunting,’ that is the product of ‘the spectral permanence of the past in the present’ (p. 40).

In examining the maintaining of local characteristics, Elliott demonstrates that this nostalgia is for a lost Lisbon, an imagined city from the past, which leads to another theoretical discussion to determine the relationship between fado's haunting and space, the city itself. Elliott argues the music is a forum where the meaning of the city as a space can be renegotiated, and primarily where parts of the city lost to modernity can be preserved. He relies on Michael de Certeau's idea of memory as a spatial practice, that liberated spaces become ‘filled’ with collective memories requiring a physical place in which they become ‘fixed’ (borrowing from Jacques Derrida's ‘ontologizing of remains’). The indication is that the fixing of memories of a lost and imagined city are creative responses to the speed of modernity and urban renewal. Therefore, the city is not just experienced passively, with subjects submitting to the spatial organisation of architecture, but is experienced productively as memory makes city ‘spaces’ into ‘places.’ Rather than drawing on the common thread of fado scholarship suggesting its subversive nature in relation to the authoritarian regime of Salazar (the Estado Novo), Elliott relies on a number of interesting literary sources such as Calvino, Borges, and Proust to explore spatial theories. The problem with this method is that Portugal and fado are at risk of being marginalised in Elliott's theoretical analysis of space and memory. Fortunately in the third chapter he brings the study back to main topic by presenting his compelling theory on how fado and Lisbon ‘bear witness’ to one another. The process of ‘witnessing,’ characterised by the acts of seeing and saying, and the ‘transference’ which occurs in-between through language, leads to a ‘fixing’ and ‘fencing-off’ of the city (p. 102). Through fado, which acts much like photography or film, Lisbon is a ‘sounded city’ which has become a ‘fetishized object,’ enhanced and invented every time it is framed, that is, remembered and forgotten through the music (p. 105). This relationship however, is not one-way, as in this process Lisbon also comes to physically represent the sounds of fado.

The narrative becomes much more music-centred in the final two chapters which consider the emergence of novo fado, particularly following the death of Amália Rodrigues in 1999, and fado's place within a ‘world music’ context. The author makes the case that despite the fado's links to tradition and Portuguese culture, as well as being the ‘product of a nostalgic mariner’ it nonetheless exists within ‘a globalized discursive space’ (p. 214). Elliott challenges purist notions that authentic fado only exists within the cheap café of Lisbon, and ‘unapologetically’ examines the recorded works of the main exponents of novo fado. He considers the albums of singers such as Mariza, Mísia and Katia Guerrero to demonstrate the way in which these singers straddle the boundaries between the traditional and the global. By examining song texts and analysing the sonic characteristics of their music, Elliott highlights their employment of techniques which maintain traces of the past, such as evoking nostalgia for a lost Lisbon and paying homage to Amália, while incorporating elements from the multitude of international musical cultures present in Portugal since the 1950s. The author does away with the isolationist folkloric theories and considers fado's development alongside the rise and popularity of international genres such as rock and jazz in Portugal.

While fado, Lisbon and Portugal are sometimes in danger of disappearing from view in Elliott's theoretical discussions, the author successfully examines the interaction of past and present, and local and global dynamics contributing to ‘what fado is’ (p. 214). Fado and the Place of Longing is convincing in the way it moves beyond defensive tones of music scholarship which attempt to rescue folk genres from the hands of a fickle and homogenising music industry. By considering the role of the new fadistas and the role of recording technology in producing a ‘memory community’ in Portugal and abroad, this book is a significant contribution to understanding the creation of suadade in a highly globalized twenty-first century.