Book Review: Foreign Soil and Other Stories by Maxine Beneba Clarke

Foreign Soil: And Other Stories by Maxine Beneba Clarke
Publisher: Atria
Release Date: January 3, 2017
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

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.

These short stories are set in a wide variety of countries from Sudan to Australia to Jamaica just to name a few. Clarke does an excellent job of capturing the dialect and voice of the people of each country. The stories are consistently good and gut-wrenching. Most touch on issues of race in some way. For instance, Shu Yi is about an Asian girl’s first day at an all-white school. As you can probably guess, things did not go well.

This book was one of my book club’s selections and we found plenty to talk about. Foreign Soil has won several awards and it’s easy to see why. Even though I normal don’t enjoy reading short story collections, I liked this one. Just beware that it’s a downer – you’ll want to be in the right mood when you start it.