$29.95 (Hardcover book / Alfred A Knopf / ISBN:9780307268082)
The Boat
The Boat will take you everywhere.
In 1979, Nam Le's family left Vietnam for Australia, an experience that inspires the first and last stories in The Boat. In between, however, Le's imagination lays claim to the world.
The Boat takes us from a tourist in Tehran to a teenage hit man in Columbia; 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, the make up a collection of astonishing diversity and achievement.
Port Melbourne Book Club
When You Are Engulfed In Flames
$33.00 (Trade paperback / Little Brown )
Sedaris, king of the poignantly absurd, triumphs in this sixth essay collection (after 2004's Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim). There is less focus here on the Sedaris clan as a whole, though the various members ... More »
Review
Alfred and Emily
$27.99 (Trade paperback / Fourth Estate )
'I think my father's rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the use of... More »