WINNER- Indie Book Awards 2015 (Best Debut Fiction Book)
WINNER- The ABIA Award (Literary Fiction Book of the Year) 2015
WINNER- Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelists of 2015
WINNER- Victorian Premier's Unpublished Manuscript Award 2013

'Foreign Soil will stay with you with the force of elemental truth. Clarke is the real deal' Dave Eggers

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. This is contemporary fiction at its finest.

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 . . .

'A woven tapestry of the shared experience of living in a country that is not your own' Stylist

About the Author
Maxine Beneba Clarke is an Australian writer and slam poetry champion of Afro-Caribbean descent. She is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Gil Scott Heron is on Parole and Nothing Here Needs Fixing. Her debut short fiction collection Foreign Soil won the Victorian Premier's Award Unpublished Manuscript Award (2013), the Indie Book Award for Debut Fiction (2015) and the Australian Book Industry Award for Literary Fiction Book of The Year (2015). Foreign Soil was also shortlisted for the Stella Prize for Australian Women's writing (2015). Corsair will publish her memoir The Hate Race in 2016.

Reviews
A phenomenal achievement . . . Clarke writes with both fists raised. * Mslexia *



Book Information
ISBN 9781472151476
Author Maxine Beneba Clarke
Format Paperback
Page Count 304
Imprint Corsair
Publisher Little, Brown Book Group
Weight(grams) 240g
Dimensions(mm) 196mm * 128mm * 22mm