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....

Winner: Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist 2015. Literary Fiction of the Year, Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) 2015. Debut Fiction, Indie Book Awards 2015. Victorian Premier's Unpublished Manuscript Award 2013. Shortlisted: The Stella Prize 2015. UTS Glenda Adams Debut Fiction, NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2015. ABIA Matt Richell Award for New Writers 2015. Victorian Premier's Literary Award 2015. Longlisted for the Dobbie Literary Award 2015.