Foreign Soil: And Other Stories Hardcover – January 3, 2017

Amazing. Marvelously written and impactful

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.

I loved these stories from across the globe. The authors told great tales that were interesting and showed how talent indeed exists everywhere. I highly recommend this book.

I read this book based on the recommendation from Dave Eggers whose "Zeitoun" I found an excellent read. But this book I found very hard to enjoy. Each chapter is a short story that seems to end before you understand what happened to the character. The story flow in some of the chapters was confusing. There are also numerous "F-word" occurrences and it also helps if you can interpret Ebonics in some chapters.