"'Ethnic literature's hot. And important too', remarks a character in The Boat. Nam Le, a Vietnamese born Australian who won a writing scholarship in Iowa, travels outside the restrictions of category stereotyping. The Boat, written mainly in Iowa, is his first collection of short stories. His virtuosity is such that he transports the reader into the heads of a teenage assassin in Colombia, a Japanese schoolchild moments before the atom bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, a New York artist and a woman visiting Iran, all sandwiched between two wonderful, semi-autobiographical tales.

On this evidence there’s no doubt that Le is a storyteller of dizzying power. He adopts a distinctive voice for every story and each tale pounds along at such a pace that it threatens to leap out of the page. Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice is narrated by a young writer named Nam, at a prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Halflead Bay is a coming-of-age drama set in a Victorian coastal town and both they and the other five pieces are flawless. What keeps this collection vivid, compelling and impossible to resist is the author’s eye for the textures of daily life and his ability to portray a full range of human emotions. Inspiring, heart-wrenching and forcefully stunning The Boat is an energetic and thought-provoking read. Penguin, $24.99.