1. Which was your favourite story and why?

2. Everyone who talks about this book mentions its virtuosity and range.Were you impressed by the breadth and variety of the stories i.e. theirdivergent settings and their differing protagonists in terms of age, gender,class and cultural background?

3. Do you think Le is best at capturing the internal, psychological make-upof his characters or the external, cultural landscapes of his settings? Orboth?

4. The first story is very self-referential: it¹s as much a reflection onthe writing of narrative as it is about the protagonist ‘Nam Le’. Do youthink this story is meant to be read as autobiographical or is itchallenging our assumptions about the authorial ‘I’?

5. Just over half of the stories are in the first person: did you find yourelated to those stories differently from the third-person stories? Is iteasier to feel empathy with a character when their story is told in theirown voice?

6. Halflead Bay is a recognisable Australian coming-of-age story a la TimWinton. Did you find it very familiar or did it show you small-town coastalAustralia afresh? (Le said in his Readings interview that: Fiction makesstrange even the places we think we know.)

7. Can you see any overarching themes in this collection, perhaps, asMichiko Kakutani from The New York Times (see link below) suggested: ‘thepsychological conflicts people experience when they find their own hopes andambitions slamming up against familial expectations of the brute facts ofhistory.’

8. Did you enjoy the range of this collection or do you prefer storycollections that are more tonally consistent with similar subject matterthroughout as with, say, Alice Munro or Tim Winton?

There have been lots of reviews of The Boat in Australia, but here are twodivergent reviews of Nam Le from The New York Times.

Michiko Kakutanihttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/books/13kaku.html

Hari Kunzruhttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/books/review/Kunzru-t.html