Penguin Australia Pty Ltd The Boat

This book is featured in our Refugees and Displaced People page, a collection of the best books to understand the courage and plight of forced migration, including books for children of stories and issues

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Product Description

'The Boat raises the bar for Australian writing.'
PETER CRAVEN, Heat

'Nam Le is . . . a disturber of the peace.

'Consider the subjects of his stories: a child assassin in Colombia ('Cartagena'), an ageing New York artist desperate for a reconciliation with his daughter ('Meeting Elise'), a boy's coming of age in a rough Victorian fishing town ('Halflead Bay'), before the first atomic bomb falls in Japan ('Hiroshima'), The suffocations of theocracy in Iran ('Tehran Calling'). This astonishing range is topped and tailed by accounts of the uneasy reunion of a young Vietnamese writer in America with his ex-soldier father, and by the title story – the escape of a group of exhausted refugees from the Vietcong in a wallowing boat.

Awards:

- Dylan Thomas Prize (UK) 2009 - Winner Fiction
- Commonwealth Writers' Prize Regional 2009 - Long-listed Best First Book
- SMH Young Novelist 2009 - Winner
- NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2009 - Winner Book of the Year
- NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2009 - Winner New Writing
- Australian Book Industry Awards 2009 - Short-listed Book of the Year
- Australian Book Industry Awards 2009 - Short-listed Literary Fiction
- Australian Book Industry Awards 2009 - Winner Newcomer of the Year
- Qld Premier's Literary Award 2009 - Winner Australian Short Story Collection - Arts Queensland
- Qld Premier's Literary Award 2009 - Short-listed Fiction
- Victorian Premier's Literary Award 2009 - Short-listed Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction
- Prime Minister's Literary Award 2009 - WINNER