In the lead up to the announcement of the 2015 Stella Prize winner, our four Shadow Reading Groups read the six books on the Stella shortlist and held regular book club meetings to discuss them.

At the conclusion of these meetings, the Shadow Reading Group members debated at length to reach a consensus on which book they would like to see win the 2015 Stella Prize.

The winner, as predicted by each of the Shadow Reading Groups, is…

Grandma’s Shame

Foreign Soil by Maxine Beneba Clarke

Our shadow reading group chose Foreign Soil to win the Stella Prize, with Heat and Light coming in a close second. While we thought all the books in the shortlist brought something unique and deserving to Australia literature, we felt that Foreign Soil and Heat and Light, being written by women of colour about people of colour, stood out more than the others. Both books brought us new stories we hadn’t heard before, from perspectives we rarely get to read about, and we value any text that allows us to find reflections of ourselves within the pages.

Ultimately, we went with Foreign Soil because while Heat and Light is a commendable and remarkable collection, Foreign Soil was phenomenal for an emerging writer. We felt that it was exquisitely well-written and edited; it is clear that a lot of hard work went into its creation and publication by both the author and the publisher. We were impressed by the authority of each distinctive voice throughout and loved how the collection takes us on what feels like an authentic journey around the world. We loved that we were exposed to often confronting and difficult scenes and characters, and that we were brought to a deeper understanding of some their issues and experiences. The depiction of the lives of the overlooked and mistreated was poignant and completely engrossing. The use of dialect we felt was done to great effect; in the hands of a lesser writer it would have bordered on mockery and perhaps outright racism, but Maxine Beneba Clarke does it with skill and respect.

Though it isn’t an easy read, emotionally speaking, Foreign Soil is an accessible, beautifully written work of thought-provoking fiction that we hope many others will take the time to read and enjoy.

Big Ideas, Books and Arts

Foreign Soil by Maxine Beneba Clarke

Our bookclub enjoyed reading and discussing each of the books on the shortlist and it was hard to pick a winner from such a fantastic list, however, after a lot of discussion, we agreed that Foreign Soil by Maxine Beneba Clarke was our favourite.

We liked how each of the stories was unique, yet linked through the title and the theme of ‘Foreign Soil’ and the idea of being outside ‘mainstream’ society. We talked about which stories were our favourite from the collection, with some finding ‘The Stilt Fishermen of Kathaluwa’ especially haunting and unforgettable as it vividly captured the despair of an asylum seeker. Others loved ‘Gaps in the Hickory’, with its warm yet realistic portrayal of a struggling family, and the especially enthralling character of Delores. We also enjoyed the cleverness and the subtle humour of the final story, ‘The Sukiyaki Book Club’.

We loved the clarity and the poetry of her writing, and the colourful characters that came to life within the space of a few pages. The stories took us to many different places. Each of the stories was incredibly powerful and hard to forget, with some of the images, such as David flying on his bike, still as vivid in our minds as when we first read them. In this collection, Maxine Beneba Clarke has managed to conjure up ten unique worlds, each very different, but equally able to draw you in within just a few words or lines of text, and each as unwilling to let you go.

We will be waiting impatiently for her next book.

Cowra’s Stellar Book Club

The Invisible History of the Human Race by Christine Kenneally

The book is excellent because…

• …of the skill required to bring all of this information together to make it accessible to readers.
• …of the easy flowing style of the writer, which felt as though I had had a chat with the author.
• …of the writer’s scholarship which needs to be recognised.  Kenneally makes a difficult subject accessible and easy to understand.  The book will have long lasting impact not only because of this, but also because it challenges our uninformed ideas about hereditary history.

The book is original because…

• …of the serious factual research.
• …we believe (although we are not able to confirm) that the topic has not been dealt with in such a way previously.

The book is engaging because…

• …of the style of writing, which some of us likened to Bill Bryson, whereby facts and history are discussed in a colloquial, easy-to-understand manner for the ‘ordinary’ reader.
• … it balances science with the humanities.
• …each of us was engaged, some more slowly to begin with than others.

General thoughts

• Attitudes can be passed down through generations.
• How will information be stored/used in the future?
• Genealogy is the academic equivalent of Googling oneself.
• We enjoyed the continuous flow of information arousing curiosity in one’s own history.
• It’s surprising that genealogists are considered with such disdain among academics.
• We all admired Kenneally’s ability to collect information from across the globe and through the centuries, then put it all together in a meaningful way.
• We also admired the fact that Kenneally does not appear to suggest that she has answers.  Her points were open-ended, but it was not necessary to reach conclusions.

Top Titles

Foreign Soil by Maxine Beneba Clarke

This was our second year as an official Stella Shadow Reading Group, and we have once again found the shortlist to be exceptionally strong. One aspect of Stella that we absolutely love is that it is open to writers of any genre and this challenges us to compare some very different styles of book. After much discussion, we have chosen a book that for most of us was a re-read, Maxine Beneba Clarke’s Foreign Soil, as our prediction for winner of The Stella Prize 2015.

We found Maxine’s use of language deep and richly textured, and in an era when emerging authors are so often told to ‘write what you know’, she has boldly stepped out of this comfort zone to embody the role of literary ventriloquist to stunning effect. She embraces narratives of otherness with seamless ease and shows great respect and compassion in each and every story. These stories are undeniably skilful, thought-provoking, and are by turns heartbreaking and heartwarming. These are brave, important stories, political in both their rage and their tenderness. They deal with pressing issues of longing, belonging, migration, displacement, discrimination and desperation in worlds past and present, and we are so glad they have now been told.

Above all, we agree that Foreign Soil was a joy to read both times round. It is a celebration of language itself, in all its forms, and Maxine’s spoken word background shines brightly through her writing. These are stories that stay with the reader long after the reading is done.

We truly loved this beautiful, passionate book and hope that the Stella judges have too.