The Hate Race

With force and grace, by stealth and shock, The Hate Race makes its point, gets under the reader's skin. - The Saturday Paper

The Hate Race is a moving memoir of national significance - The Stella Prize

Clarke's book is utterly compelling. And it might just break your heart. - AFR

She is not quiet in this memoir, and we need to hear her. - The Australian

When you think about racism as one big, swarming mass of hatred, you're ignoring the small words and actions that have huge impacts on individual people, but Maxine's book makes those aggressions impossible to ignore. The Hate Race ... should be essential reading for every Australian/every person. - Brodie Lancaster - author of No Way! Okay, Fine.

Maxine Beneba Clarke is THE powerful voice of Australian literature....A book like that is important. Maxine Beneba Clarke has written a very important book. An extraordinary book. A truly remarkable and powerful book. A book I hope as many people as possible will read. - Jon Page, owner of Pages & Pages Booksellers

Maxine Beneba Clarke's storytelling in The Hate Race has a heft to it that is at once steeped in history, and also exquisitely and playfully modern; it is lyrical, sincere and ironic, but above all, it is fierce. What starts out as a nostalgic childhood memoir soon turns into a revealing account of racism in Australia. The Hate Race explores the sun-drenched, suburban, middle-class childhood of Clarke and her siblings, born in Australia to parents of Jamaican and Guyanese descent who emigrated from England in the 1970s. It moves from West Indian folkloric flourishes into familiar childhood episodes, only to deliver, again and again, that appalling gut punch: that being black in Australia is to be the subject of racism. Technically, this book is near-perfect. At the beginning and end of chapters, and at select moments throughout the narrative, Clarke emphasises the storytelling with exquisite stylistic repetitions: 'this is how it sang', 'this is how it stalks us', 'this is how it happened, or else what's a story for'. Never before have I read narrative repetition executed with such precision, poetry and power. The Hate Race will appeal to anyone with an interest in Australian history, culture and identity today. - Books + Publishing

There is a tendency to talk about a young author such as Clarke as a 'writer to watch' with the expectation that she may, one day, achieve the extraordinary. With The Hate Race, she already has; don't watch, watch out. - The Australian