The Boat
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4.2 • 13 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
'A fearless new Australian voice that accepts no geographical limits: these are stories of leaping power and the most breath-taking grace and intimacy.' Helen Garner
'Wonderful stories that snarl and pant across our crazed world . . . an extraordinary performance. Nam Le is a heartbreaker, not easily forgotten.' Junot Diaz
The Boat takes us from a tourist in Tehran to a teenage hit man in Colombia; from an aging New York artist to a boy coming of age in a small Victorian fishing town; from the city of Hiroshima just before the bomb is dropped to the haunting waste of the South China Sea in the wake of another war. Each story uncovers a raw human truth. Each story is absorbing and fully realised as a novel. Together, they make up a collection of astonishing diversity and achievement.
Winner 2009 Australian Book Industry Awards for Newcomer of the Year Winner 2009 SMH Young Novelist Prize for Writing for Young Adults Winner 2009 Melbourne Prize for Literature for Best Writing Award Winner 2009 QLD Premier’s Literary Award for Australian Short Story Collection Winner 2009 NSW Premier’s Awards for New Writing and Book of the Year Winner 2009 Dylan Thomas Prize for Fiction Winner 2009 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction Winner 2010 Kathleen Mitchell Award Prize for Writing for Young Adults
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
From a Colombian slum to the streets of Tehran, seven characters in seven stories struggle with very particular Swords of Damocles in Pushcart Prize winner Le's accomplished debut. In "Halflead Bay," an Australian mother begins an inevitable submission to multiple sclerosis as her teenage son prepares for the biggest soccer game of his life. The narrator of "Meeting Elise," a successful but ailing artist in Manhattan, mourns his dead lover as he anticipates meeting his daughter for the first time since she was an infant. The opening "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice" features a Vietnamese character named Nam who is struggling to complete his Iowa Writer's Workshop master's as his father comes for a tense visit, the first since an earlier estrangement shattered the family. The story's ironies "You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing," says a fellow student to Nam are masterfully controlled by Le, and reverberate through the rest of this peripatetic collection. Taken together, the stories cover a vast geographic territory (Le was born in Vietnam and immigrated to Australia) and are filled with exquisitely painful and raw moments of revelation, captured in an economical style as deft as it is sure.
