Foreign Soil
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Foreign Soil
Narrated by:
Maxine Beneba Clarke
Buy Now for $27.99
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Narrated by:
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Maxine Beneba Clarke
About this listen
Winner of the Indie Book Award for Debut Fiction 2015
Winner of the Victorian Premier's Unpublished Manuscript Award 2013
In Melbourne's western suburbs, in a dilapidated block of flats overhanging the rattling Footscray train lines, a young black mother is working on a collection of stories.
The book is called Foreign Soil. Inside its covers, 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 warpath 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.
The young mother keeps writing, the rejection letters keep arriving . . .
In this collection of award-winning stories, Melbourne writer Maxine Beneba Clarke has given a voice to the disenfranchised, the lost, the downtrodden and the mistreated. It will challenge you, it will have you by the heartstrings.
'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.' - Dave Eggers bestselling author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
'Foreign Soil is a collection of outstanding literary quality and promise. Clarke is a confident and highly skilled writer.' - Hannah Kent, bestselling author of Burial Rites
'An assured and skilful debut' - Weekend Australian
Critic Reviews
Foreign Soil is a book in the tradition of Nam Le and Junot Diaz, with echoes of Zadie Smith, Monica Ali and Alice Pung - all writers Clarke finds inspiring. It is also the work of a unique voice and an astonishing ventriloquist. Ten stories, written over several years, enter the minds and hearts and dialects of Africans, West Indians, African-Americans and whites of all descriptions. (Jane Sullivan)
This is a remarkable collection of disparate and disquieting short stories ... Clarke has a chameleon-like ability to inhabit different characters and surroundings ... her stories are powerful and relevant and show her versatility and ability to write local dialects and employ different literary techniques. (BC)
In this collection of award-winning stories, Melbourne writer Maxine Beneba Clarke has given a voice to the disenfranchised, the lost, the downtrodden and the mistreated. It will challenge you and grab you by the heartstrings. This is contemporary fiction at its finest.
Clarke lobs a Molotov under any reader expecting a literary comfort zone ... [Foreign Soil] marks the arrival of a major new voice in the Australian literary landscape (Martin Shaw)
It delivers a series of brilliant, moving portraits that reach beyond the tabloid headlines and shed light on some of society's most marginalised groups
Clarke writes of contemporary issues in a nuanced and rhythmical way
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Her strong sense of character and place is utterly compelling. Quite unlike anything you may have read before.
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Her strong sense of character and place is utterly compelling. Quite unlike anything you may have read before.
[Of Maxine's work] ‘amazing.’
'One of the most compelling voices in Australian poetry this decade.'
These thoughtful stories cut deep. They are a cry from the dispossessed. (Paul Robinson)
There is a quality of pain in which Clarke specialises; that of the stranger hurt by the peculiar circumstances of the grand diaspora of the poor world towards the rich. Yet the palette she employs is marvellously broad.
...
It is this creative ruthlessness, this willingness to invert the usual liberal pieties, that saves Clarke's stories from being politically impeccable agitprop, and it is the anger and despair stalking her characters, possessing them in an almost demonic fashion, that stays with the reader even after the words with which they were summoned fade away.
...
It is this creative ruthlessness, this willingness to invert the usual liberal pieties, that saves Clarke's stories from being politically impeccable agitprop, and it is the anger and despair stalking her characters, possessing them in an almost demonic fashion, that stays with the reader even after the words with which they were summoned fade away.
Anyone who's ever dismissed the short story as an inferior art form compared to its more showy, full length, novelistic counterpart may have to reconsider after picking up Maxine Beneba Clarke's debut collection.
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a substantial body of work and offer an exciting precursor to Clarke's future writings (Thuy On)
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a substantial body of work and offer an exciting precursor to Clarke's future writings (Thuy On)
[an] arresting short-story collection (Owen Richardson)
Clarke, born in Australia of Afro-Caribbean descent, is being heralded as a major new voice in the Australian literary landscape.
Beautifully written
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Heartbreakingly beautiful if possible
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