A sharp, politically alive short story collection from Maxine Beneba Clarke, moving across race, migration, displacement, class, language, family, belonging and the brutal economies of power people carry with them.

The stories range widely — Australia, the Caribbean, Africa, the UK — but the collection holds together through voice: rhythmic, direct, unsentimental, and alert to the ways people are made foreign by place, history, whiteness, poverty, paperwork, and other bureaucracies of the soul. 

This is a strong one for readers of contemporary Australian literature, diasporic fiction, migrant writing, and short stories that actually know how to land a punch rather than simply hover around an interesting premise. Clarke has that good combination of formal range and moral pressure: the stories feel intimate, but never small. 

Paperback. Hachette Australia, this edition published 2017. Originally first published in Australia and New Zealand in 2014. Light cover wear/handling visible, but overall very decent.