The Boat
By Nam Le
Canongate £12.99, 288 pages

A piece of advice that every aspiring novelist is sure to get, sooner or later, is to “write what you know”. By restricting yourself to direct experience and autobiography, the theory goes, you give your narrative authenticity. Now comes a first book by a young Vietnamese-Australian author that challenges this maxim: The Boat, a collection of short stories by Nam Le, insists that literature must also be created out of worlds the writer does not know.