The Boat
Shortlist year:
2009
Shortlist category:
Fiction
Published by:
Penguin Random House
About the book
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 as absorbing and fully realised as a novel. Together, they make up a collection of astonishing diversity and achievement.
About the author
Nam Le
Nam Le’s first book, The Boat, received the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the Melbourne Prize (Best Writing Award) the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award among other honours. It was selected as a New York Times Notable Book and Editor’s Choice, the best debut of 2008 by the Australian Book Review and New York Magazine, and a book of the year by The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Herald Sun, The Monthly, and numerous sources around the world.
The Boat has been translated into thirteen languages and its stories widely anthologised.
Judges’ comments
Nam Le's collection of fiction, The Boat, which comprises short and long stories, artfully arrayed, is one of the most impressive debuts of recent years.
The range of subjects and settings astonishes, as does the assurance and control with which the author immerses us in the stories that he makes from them.
While the span of the fiction is cosmopolitan, each story is intensely attuned to the local circumstances that deform and enable the lives of these varied characters, animated as they are by love and despair.
As shown especially in the final and title story, Nam Le combines almost reckless artistic boldness with highly disciplined craft.
