It is hard to believe that this is the author's first book. His ability to accurately portray the lives and emotional conflicts of characters, and to describe their worlds through their own eyes, is astonishing.  In the book's opening and closing stories, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice", and the eponymous "The Boat", the characters, like the author, are Vietnamese, so his uncanny ability to drill into their thoughts and feelings might be understandable. In the intervening five stories, however, Le steps with absolute authenticity into the shoes and the minds of a young Colombian gang member ordered to kill his best friend; an aging New York painter trying desperately to connect with his daughter on the eve of her Carnegie Hall debut; an Australian teenager faced with both the threat of a vicious bully and the deterioration of his dying mother; a young Japanese girl separated from her family in wartime Hiroshima; and a young American woman whose visit to an Iranian friend lands her in the terrifying world of young revolutionaries protesting the oppression of women in Tehran.

Conflict and violence of a sort are present in all of Nam Le's stories, but so are the affections and intimacies of families and friends. There is ugliness, but there is also the beauty of the landscape, whether natural or man-made. Here, for example, is Le's description of the view that greets Sarah as her plane descends into Tehran:

These stories are not for everyone, but if you enjoy realistic tales set in a variety of places around the globe, and peopled by finely drawn characters faced with conflicts, both physical and psychological, "The Boat" is well worth a read.