Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Our guest today is Maxine Beneba Clarke, author of Foreign Soil, published by 37 INK/Atria on January 3rd.

Maxine is a novelist, poet and editor living in Melbourne Australia. She was the Hazel Rowley Fellowship winner for Biography and also won the 2013 Victorian Premier Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. Foreign Soil is Maxine’s first book.

And is a collection of 11 short stories, stories that are full of pain, meanness, nostalgia, fear, monsters, sometimes happiness and sometimes a bit of a harbinger of what America has done to itself with our election of Donald Trump.

The stories are engaging, surprising, emotionally riveting and haunting and each conveys something that at the time of reading the first word, one didn’t expect. Hard to do.

They take place all over the world. America, London, Australia, Jamaica, Africa, yet they all knife us with a stark reality about the world around us, not necessarily a world we choose, but a world that increasingly and most recently, closes in around us.

These stories are different than what you’ve read lately, and for that reason alone (amongst many others) I encourage you to come by the shop and pick up a copy.