The International IJSLL ( PRINT ) ISSN  -  IJSLL ( ONLINE) ISSN  -  Review Journal of Affiliation Department of English and Communication, City University of Hong Kong email: enbhatia@cityu.edu.hk IJSLL VOL  .    – 4 doi : 10.1558/ijsll.v19i1.131 © , EQUINOX PUBLISHING The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law Storied Conflict Talk: Narrative Construction in Mediation Katherine A. Stewart and Madeline M. Maxwell (2010) John Benjamins 137 pp Reviewed by Vijay K. Bhatia Analysis of mediation discourse is a relatively new area of study. In this context, Storied Confict Talk by Stewart and Maxwell is quite a novel and innovative e fort. It makes use of fve carefully chosen disputes mediated by the local uni- versity confict resolution centre, focusing primarily on dispute narratives to highlight some of the communicative practices of disputants as well as those of the mediators – especially the way parties in confict talk co-construct their discursive strategies. As the authors point out, the main purpose of the book is twofold: frstly, to see the extent to which the mediation cases examined ‘exhibit features of the bilateral adversarial narrative pattern’ (p. 5) as suggested in existing literature in narrative theory, and secondly, if not so in all cases, what ‘alternative dispute narrative patterns are co-constructed’ (p. 5) within them. Although the study has a rather limited scope in terms of the context in which the confict talk takes place – the data is drawn entirely from the university mediation centre – the study is quite extensive in terms of its analytic scope and treatment, and the book, on the whole, is an interesting and insightful explora- tion of communicative practices in the negotiation of mediation disputes. Storied Confict Talk is relatively short and is packed with interesting