Temporality in Mobile Lives: Contemporary Asia– Australia Migration and Everyday Time by Shanthi Robertson is a welcome addition to the Global Migration and Social Change series published by Bristol University Press. The aim of the series is to offer a platform for new scholarship in refugee and migration studies that is open to different disciplinary perspectives, theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches. Robertson's dissection of migrant biographies offers a unique perspective on the ambivalence, hybridity and uncertainty of migrant experience in contemporary societies. Through a fine-grained examination of everyday ruptures, transits, beginnings and endings in the lives of Asian migrants in Australia, Robertson portrays a vivid and layered series of unexpected contingencies and detours, and necessarily fluid aspirations and desires, all framed within a sense of unfinished and always precarious mobility.

Through the concept of chronomobility, Robertson's book contributes to an emerging body of scholarship in migration studies which brings the temporal both theoretically and empirically into focus in the analysis of migration and migrant experiences, casting light on the multiple and ‘different time-space horizons guiding the lives of migrants and non-migrants’ (Scott, 2006: 1119). How these multiple regimes and logics of time both produce and are produced by and in migration processes is a core concern of Temporality in Mobile Lives, in which young, middle class and aspirational Asian migrants, mainly from India, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines, have to reckon with the reality of migration regimes that can disrupt, delay, halt or accelerate their everyday lives out of their control.

Robertson's approach brings to the fore questions currently at the margin of migration scholarship, including the role of time in the governance of mobile bodies, not only when on the move but also in the process of settlement; the impact of multiple regimes and logics of time on migrant biographies and everyday lived experiences; the salience of timelines and timings to the structuring of migrants’ social relations; and the ways migrant mobilities shape everyday temporal practices in their places of residence.

The lives of Robertson's informants offer a rich and compelling counter narrative to established understandings of the migration experience, particularly in settler societies, centred on the linearity of migrant trajectories, from arrival to settlement to integration.