The migration corridor linking Turkey and Germany stands as one of the most significant bilateral movements in modern history. This phenomenon evolved from the labour recruitment agreements of 1961 into a complex diasporic reality spanning multiple generations. In this context, A Place in the Homeland? Turkish-German Return Migration by Nilay Kılınç and Russell King offers a rigorous examination of a specific trajectory within this history by investigating the return of the second-generation Turkish-Germans to their parental homeland. The book comprises eight chapters arranged in a logical sequence that mirrors the human migration life course. Chapter 1 defines second-generation return and introduces the chronotope lens, while Chapter 2 introduces the fundamental importance of place and lays out the place-based research design and the three field sites. Subsequent empirical chapters move broadly along the life course: Chapter 3 reconstructs family migration histories and second-generation lives in Germany; Chapter 4 examines the decision-making processes and the various routes taken to the parental homeland; Chapter 5 analyses work, careers and transcultural capital; Chapter 6 focuses on gender, family and marriage; and Chapter 7 explores the reconstruction of transnational identities and belonging in the new setting. Finally, Chapter 8 ties together the narratives presented throughout the book and reflects on future trajectories, including possible re-return to Germany and the prospects of the next generation. The book makes an important contribution to our understanding of counter-diasporic mobility by conceptualising second-generation return as a distinct migration ‘chronotope’ rather than a simple reversal of movement and by questioning ‘where and what is home’. It deserves attention from all scholars concerned with return migration, gendered and generational power dynamics and the construction of alternative social spheres in the ancestral homeland. Equally praiseworthy, the book's methodological orientation merits attention from researchers who prioritise ethnographic depth, reflexive transparency and the voices of the subjects. The study draws on qualitative data derived from 71 in-depth narrative interviews conducted between 2012 and 2019 across several regions of Turkey. The research design is spatial, selecting three distinct geographical contexts to test the importance of place: the cosmopolitan megalopolis of Istanbul, the tourism-driven Mediterranean coast of Antalya, and a heterogeneous grouping of provincial towns in the Black Sea and Anatolian regions. The authors manage this breadth of data through a distinct portrayal technique, selecting eight specific participants whose longitudinal life stories serve as narrative anchors for the empirical chapters while incorporating the voices of other participants. Through these portrayals, the reader observes the social fabric of each society through the eyes of the returnees, gets to know each character as their lives change across the chapters and enters intimate spaces such as family dinner tables and the minibus used to transport gifts to relatives during summer holidays. This attention to fine-grained personal stories lends the work a strong sense of immediacy and makes the subjects' lives feel as tangible as they might appear in a documentary film. A key strength of the book lies in its clear argument that second-generation return represents a specific migration chronotope, that is, a configuration and fusion of time and space embedded in biographical trajectories. Drawing on Bakhtin (Bakhtin 1981), the authors stress that chronotope expresses the inseparability of space and time, so that time becomes palpable and visible through narrated events in migrant biographies, with places functioning as organising centres for fundamental narrative events. Applying this framework, the book defines second-generation return as a temporal process that interweaves genealogical time (the return of the second generation to the homeland whence their parents departed), biographical time (age, gender, family circumstances), and the historical phases of the Turkey-Germany migration corridor with concrete places of resettlement in Turkey. This framing moves beyond standard models that treat return as a simple endpoint and situates it within longer chains of mobility, family decisions and shifting opportunity structures across the life course. The book also challenges the standard sociological focus on the nation-state as the primary unit of analysis. The authors argue for a re-scaling of the transnational to the translocal, in response to critiques that transnationalism and diaspora concepts often operate in spatially dislocated and deterritorialised terms, in order to capture how returnees evaluate concrete combinations of labour-market niches, lifestyle possibilities and moral expectations tied to each site. The comparative design of the study gives empirical weight to this claim. A return to Istanbul produces different life outcomes than a return to the Black Sea coast or the Anatolian interior, since the metropolis offers dense professional fields, higher education and a cosmopolitan cultural scene, whereas provincial towns restrict opportunities and intensify social surveillance. Antalya and its coastal resorts form a third configuration, where tourism-driven labour markets reward German and English language skills and where more liberal social norms allow some returnees to reinvent themselves as mobile service workers or small entrepreneurs. These contrasts show how the second-generation's translocal processes and shifting translocational positionalities shape home-making, identity and belonging. By treating cities as distinct contexts rather than as interchangeable parts of a single homeland, the authors dismantle the idea of Turkey as a monolithic cultural and geographic entity and insist that second-generation return must be understood in relation to specific places, not an abstract country of origin. This conceptualisation gains further traction through the book's consistent engagement with translocality and translocational positionality. They trace how returnees occupy changing positionalities across different institutional fields in Germany and Turkey, as their habitus responds to new classed expectations, gender regimes and local power relations. Perhaps one of the most compelling theoretical contributions of the book is its interrogation of identity and belonging. The authors argue that return does not resolve the second-generation's identity crisis. Instead of seamless reintegration, returnees often face ‘double nostalgia’, longing for Germany once in Turkey, and they are frequently stigmatised by locals as Almancı (‘German-like’), a label connoting cultural degeneration and outsider status. Within this translocal frame, the book introduces the notion of a ‘fourth space’ beyond mainstream German society, the Turkish diaspora in Germany, and mainstream Turkish society. This unique socio-cultural sphere emerges from returnees' efforts to reconcile their German socialisation, diasporic experiences and dominant Turkish societal norms. It represents a space of ‘belonging in un-belonging’ that crystallises in particular Turkish locales through specific districts, workplaces and friendship circles, acquiring its own moral codes, lifestyle possibilities and forms of belonging. The chronotope thus operates as an organising device that links place-sensitive ethnography to broader debates on diaspora, transnationalism and the life course. The book also raises generative questions for future research. It proposes following the children of returnees as a distinct cohort whose life chances and identifications diverge from those of a hypothetical third generation had their parents remained in Germany, inviting longitudinal work on how these ‘counter-diasporic descendants’ position themselves within or beyond the Turkish-German diasporic field. The book also documents cases of onward moves and re-return to Germany, which opens up possibilities for research that follows multi-stage mobility, repeated departures and homecomings. In sum, this book is a must-read for scholars interested in second-generation return, translocal approaches to diaspora, and the gendered and generational reconfiguration of home and homeland. It models what place-sensitive migration scholarship can achieve when it honours both the voices of returnees and the theoretical labour of the field. Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
Tolga Tezcan (Tue,) studied this question.