Published in 2014
272 pages
Maxine Beneba Clarke is a novelist, poet, and editor living in Melbourne, Australia. In addition to being a recipient of the Hazel Rowley Fellowship for Biography she is also the winner of the 2013 Victorian Premier’s Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, the Debut Fiction Indie Award and the Literary Fiction Book of the Year in the Australian Book Industry Awards. Foreign Soil is Maxine’s first book.
What is this book about?
From a powerful new voice in international fiction, this prize-winning collection of stories crosses the world—from Africa, London, the West Indies, and Australia—and expresses the global experience.
Maxine Beneba Clarke gives voice to the disenfranchised, the lost, and the mistreated in this stunning collection of provocative and gorgeously wrought stories that 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 an Australian schoolgirl loses her way.
In the bestselling tradition of novelists such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Marlon James, this urgent, poetic, and essential work is the perfect introduction to a fresh and talented voice in international fiction.
