Too Foreign A Place

Two sons are born into a prominent Northern Irish Unionist family. Their father, Wallace Clark, is a pioneering sailor and maritime historian. The brothers, Miles and Bruce, both inherit their father's questing spirit. They also grow up during the darkest years of Northern Ireland's Troubles.


In 1993, less than a year sailing around Europe via the waterways of Russia, Miles commits suicide. Bruce, working as a foreign correspondent in Moscow, sets out to reflect on the tragedy – to place his brother's suicide within a wider context. In Too Foreign a Place, he combines memoir with a journalistic impulse to grapple with the separate, and often conflicting, quests of a father and his two sons.


Bruce traces the brothers' gilded childhood; explores the potentially unsettling discoveries Miles made on his expedition; and considers the contrasting impulses that led these two brothers on journeys around a fracturing and volatile Russia.