-
Access Our
Most Anticipated
Books of 2025!
Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
And Other Stories
by Maxine Beneba Clarke
Book Reviewed by:From a new voice in international fiction, a prize-winning collection of stories that cross the world - Africa, London, the West Indies, Australia - and express the global experience "with exquisite sensitivity" (Dave Eggers, author of The Circle).
In this collection of award-winning stories, Maxine Beneba Clarke gives voice to the disenfranchised, the lost, and the mistreated. Her stories will challenge you, move you, and change the way you view this complex world we inhabit.
Within these pages, a desperate asylum seeker is pacing the hallways of Sydney's notorious Villawood detention centre; a seven-year-old Sudanese boy has found solace in a patchwork bike; an enraged black militant is on the war-path through the rebel squats of 1960s Brixton; a Mississippi housewife decides to make the ultimate sacrifice to save her son from small-town ignorance; a young woman leaves rural Jamaica in search of her destiny; and a Sydney schoolgirl loses her way.
In the bestselling tradition of novelists such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Marlon James, this urgent, poetic, and essential work announces the arrival of a fresh and talented voice in international fiction.
The stories in Maxine Beneba Clarke’s debut collection, Foreign Soil, are far ranging in time, place, and voice. They are stylistically bold, structurally innovative and brave in subject, confronting war, child soldiers, domestic abuse, gender identity, and political violence. Clarke writes with the lyricism of a poet and the starkness of a writer of Witness. Her characters come from Australia, Sudan, Sri Lanka, the United Kingdom, Jamaica, China, and the United States, and each one feels fully fleshed, shaped by his or her native culture. They exist in the margins between belonging and “otherness,” and Clarke catches them in moments of crises that bring our common humanity to the forefront...continued
Full Review
(1153 words)
This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access,
become a member today.
(Reviewed by Naomi Benaron).
Maxine Beneba Clarke came to fiction through poetry, both written and spoken word. She was born in Australia to a Jamaican father and Guyanese mother. Her parents immigrated to the UK before settling in Australia. Her books include a memoir, The Hate Race; a children's book, The Patchwork Bike; and the poetry collections Carrying the World, Gil Scott Heron Is On Parole, and Nothing Here Needs Fixing. She won the 2017 Victorian Premiers Literary Award for Poetry. Foreign Soil won Literary Fiction Of the Year, Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) 2015, Debut Fiction, Indie Book Awards 2015, and the Victorian Premier's Unpublished Manuscript Award 2013. The Sydney Morning Herald named her Best Young Novelist of the Year 2015.
Naomi ...
This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.
If you liked Foreign Soil, try these:
by Leila Aboulela
Published 2019
A rich tableau of life as an immigrant abroad, and the challenges of navigating assimilation and difference. Elsewhere, Home draws us ineluctably into the lives of her characters as they forge new identities and reshape old ones.
by Kei Miller
Published 2018
In the wake of Marlon James's Man Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, Augustown - set in the backlands of Jamaica - is a magical and haunting novel of one woman's struggle to rise above the brutal vicissitudes of history, race, class, collective memory, violence, and myth.
There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are either well written or badly written. That is all.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Dave Eggers, bestselling author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Maxine Beneba Clarke is a powerful and fearless storyteller, and this collection - written with exquisite sensitivity and yet uncompromising - will stay with you with the force of elemental truth. Clarke is the real deal, and will, if we're lucky, be an essential voice in world literature for years to come
