RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksUnnikrishnan, writing from the perspective of the proletariat, creates a vivid bottom-up vernacular history of the modern Gulf oil state. Yet his book also poses poignant questions about migrant identity more generally ... The stories circulating on the pages of Temporary People work to render an invisible community visible. These stories push back against narratives of collective impermanence through the creation of mythologies that connect home and away, as well as past and future ... Without the consolations of citizenship or status, Unnikrishnan’s migrants become global vagrants, circulating in a kind of interstitial no man’s land where they morph from one identity to another, but never find home.
