At a time when some fiction writers are busy defending their right to incorporate autobiographical elements, and some non-fiction writers are being charged with fabrication, it seems timely of Nam Le to begin his collection of stories with one that plays with notions of authenticity in literature.

The narrator of ‘Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice’, ‘Nam Le’, is a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, as was the author. Like Nam Le, he has worked as a lawyer. This story has already been widely anthologised and it is easy to see why; it is clever and comical, evocative and moving – not to mention deeply intriguing. But this is not a collection whose chief concern is the creation of stories. The seven inventive narratives that comprise The Boat take us from Colombian slums to the South China Sea, from Hiroshima to New York, from Iowa to the Australian coast. Different cultures are explored in surprising ways.

First books can sometimes read like stylistic impersonations of other authors, but in The Boat, Nam Le has already carved out his own style. He is technically inventive throughout, creating and inhabiting very different worlds. It is immediately evident that Nam Le is in total command of these worlds. Through different points of view we encounter a teenage boy, a young girl, an older man, a young woman, and a young man. The voices are as believable as they are intriguing and various.

Get out that DVD of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Locate the scene with Marilyn Monroe in the pink satin strapless number, singing ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’. Study the dancers and find that statuesque blonde in the black bustier posing as a human candelabrum. That’s Anna David. (Her best friend, Eleanor Phillips, is one of the all-American girls with pink roses in their hair). It wasn’t Anna’s first film – if you’re very alert you can spot her in All About Eve – and it wasn’t her last. Hitchcock cast her as Kim Novak’s double in Vertigo, and Tippi Hedren’s in The Birds.

Full Hollywood stardom eluded Anna. Despite the exotic looks, her Russian accent made acting a problem. But she had a beautiful voice and sang ‘Summertime’ to Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker’s saxophone, partied with famous names and married a movie producer. Domestic abuse and heroin addiction took their toll. In the mid 1950s she moved to Paris with her new lover, a Beat poet. That didn’t work out either, but after working as a stripper and dabbling in spiritualism, she discovered Buddhism. The next stop was Darjeeling, where she began the search for peace and enlightenment via the teachings of two Tibetan lamas. Later she became a Buddhist nun, and the three of them founded a monastery in Nepal which became popular with Westerners. Anna, aged just forty-three, died alone and rather mysteriously during a meditative retreat in a cave a few years later.

Only some of this story is factual. Anna Davidoff is a fictional creation, the eponymous heroine of Sophie Cunningham’s second novel, Bird, inspired by the lives of Zina Rachevsky, Lama Zopa Ripoche, and Lama Yeshe, who did indeed found a monastery together in Nepal in the 1970s.

There are various colourful and inaccurate versions of Zina’s life on the internet. She was not a Russian princess or even Russian. She was born in New York in 1930, her German-Jewish ancestors having migrated to the United States in the 1850s. Blonde, beautiful and curvy, she appeared in a few Hollywood films and became a Paris showgirl, a party girl and a friend of the Beat poets. She went to Darjeeling in 1967 with her small daughter Rhea, and met Lama Yeshe, then about twenty-two years old, and Lama Zopa, who became her teachers and co-founders of the Kopan Monastery in Nepal. Instrumental in introducing many Westerners to Buddhism, she died as a nun, possibly from peritonitis, at a meditation retreat in the early 1970s.

That’s quite a life. Given Cunningham’s interest in Buddhism, film and pop culture, which also underpinned her first novel Geography (2005), one can understand what drew her to writing about Rachevsky, or somebody very like her. She has fictionalised her heroine Anna’s early life, and invented a more glamorous film career for her, but has stuck closely to published accounts of Zina’s activities on the hippie trail in Ceylon, India and Nepal and of her relationship with her Tibetan lamas, so much so that I was surprised she did not cite Jamyang Wangmo’s The Lawudo Lama (2005) in her extensive list of references.

Like Catherine in Geography, Anna’s life has been touched by people who have died, disappeared or been left behind. Catherine was chasing a father; Ana-Sofia, Anna’s daughter, is chasing a mother. Abandoned at the age of five when her mother went off to Nepal to become a nun, Ana-Sofia (or Az) has been raised by Eleanor, and now, some thirty years later, she is a Manhattan-based editor who lives alone with a cat, has a small circle of friends and a new man in her life. She is the same age as Anna when she died, which seems to be the catalyst for her sudden decision to abandon everything and go to India to find out more about her mother.

Information is also provided by Eleanor, who communicates her memories by letter, and on cassette recordings from Lama Dorje Rinpoche, one of the co-founders of the Nepalese monastery. Other recollections are contributed by the Beat poet Gabriel, who briefly shared her life in Paris, and Ian, Anna’s homosexual husband, whom she married in Calcutta. Told by three different first-person narrators, with corresponding jumps in time and place, the story sometimes becomes a little confusing. In most cases, the solution is not to go back but to keep on reading and trust that light will be shed by another narrator.

Cunningham studs the narrative with famous people who cross Anna’s path at various stages of her adult life – Ginsberg, Hitchcock, Bhagavan Das, Parker, Burroughs – and other references that evoke a particular time or place. Anna introduces her lamas to the music of the Beatles and the Stones; her Beat poet is a friend of Jack Kerouac; Eleanor opens a vegetarian restaurant called Serendipity in Haight Ashbury during the Summer of Love; Ian and Az march for Gay Pride in 1985 as Aids depletes the ranks.

As a character, however, and given the fascinating material of her life, Anna is less interesting than you might have supposed, mainly because the various first-person narrators are limited in what they know about her, and their accounts sometimes have all the depth of magazine profiles. We learn a great deal about what she did but little about her feelings and motivations. This may be intentional – Anna is ultimately unknowable – but it does not make for an engrossing or satisfying story. Former hippies, Beatniks, flower children and others who wandered the Eastern path to spiritual enlightenment in the latter half of the twentieth-century may think differently

The world bank’s 1993 report, The East Asian Miracle, conveyed the quasi-religious awe prompted by the economic progress of many East Asian societies in the last quarter of the twentieth century. While somewhat self-serving (it was funded by Japanese money), it set the tone for much of the political and economic analysis of East Asia in the 1990s and its prospects. With few exceptions, we were told that the future belonged to Asia, that export-oriented industrialisation and selective liberalisation were the keys to growth, and that Asian societies had certain cultural features which furthered their comparative advantage and questioned the universality of Western notions such as democracy and human rights. This suddenly ended in July 1997 when the collapse of the Thai baht prompted a series of currency crises that produced political and social turmoil across the region. The Asian financial crisis, borne of bad investments, dodgy government–business relations and that favourite of the press, ‘crony capitalism’, raised questions about the foundations of Asia’s strength and the ‘Asian century’.

Diane Armstrong is a prolific, award-winning journalist whose book-length publications began with a memoir of family history, Mosaic (1998), and The Voyage of their Life (2001), set on the SS Derna, which brought Polish-born Armstrong, her parents and 500 refugees to Australia in 1948. In 2004 Armstrong turned to fiction with Winter Journey, about a Polish-Australian forensic dentist. Now we have Nocturne, which, although it features one or two Australian characters, takes place in Warsaw, England and Germany during World War II. It is a gallant and gut-wrenching story but a difficult book to review, because it suffers from inadequate editing.

Until the spurious Polish plumber was invoked to scare the daylights out of dog-in-the-manger Europeans, Poland was recovering well from her war wounds and beginning to receive the sympathy and admiration her long and tragic history deserves. The partitions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, plus a further territorial rearrangement favouring the Soviet Union in 1943, cast this large country as a geographical and political prize always up for West and East European grabs. A passing acquaintance with her people, her history and her culture seems to point to a Slavic soul combined with Catholic or Jewish spirituality, and a wonderfully successful aspiration to romantic elegance. Polish girls dress with Parisian chic, and elderly gentlemen still kiss women’s hands.

If the above sounds like a load of clichés, this book only goes part of the way towards undoing them. The prelude takes place in the Warsaw Ghetto at the start of the war, when the central figure, Elżunia Orłowska, is a fourteen-year-old living happily with her Catholic family in their comfortable apartment. One day a prophecy of the horrors to come freezes Elżunia as the horse-drawn cab in which she and her parents are returning from a concert passes by the Jewish quarter. ‘Suddenly everything stopped moving. The street became as still and silent as a tableau ... In the ghostly stillness that descended over the street, she had a vision of an enclosure that surrounded these houses, sucked out the air and entombed all the people.’ When the Nazis arrive, Elżunia, her mother (born Jewish) and her older brother are ordered to move into the Ghetto. The description of these beleaguered, starving years is predictably harrowing and behoves us all to read it. Nevertheless, Elżunia manages to train as a nurse, house an orphan and play an heroic leading role in the Ghetto’s resistance group.

Parallel to her story is that of Adam Czartoryski, before the war a would-be diplomat who becomes, first, a courier for the external Polish Resistance and then, in England, a pilot with an RAF squadron composed largely of Polish flyers. Before this last, the paths of Elżunia and Adam crossed briefly; she gave him the cherished silver cigarette case that had belonged to her father, and thereafter designated him her dream man. As a complex, terrible saga covering six long years works its tortuous way towards D-Day, Elżunia and Adam slowly progress towards a postwar reunion in which the cigarette case plays a portentous role. You cannot believe that Armstrong will succumb to a fairy-tale ending, but unfortunately she does – though not, at least, to the most obvious scenario.

The best and most gripping passages in this book occur whenever the shocking realism of history wrenches the story from the author’s genteel hands. The accounts of the two uprisings, the first organised by the Jews in the Ghetto, the second by the Resistance fighters in wider Warsaw, are dramatic and heart-breaking. After the Ghetto uprising is brutally crushed, an unforgettable episode follows when those who have not been killed by the Nazis, many of them youngsters, several of them wounded, make their stomach-churning escape through the putrid sludge and foul air of the sewers. A more upbeat but equally tense chapter describes the airdrop in which Adam and his Lancaster crew shower the Warsaw insurgents with desperately needed supplies. The Luftwaffe is shelling the British planes, Warsaw is burning and almost invisible in the smoke, but their target emerges far below as a large red cross made by people lying on the ground holding hurricane lamps.

These events make superb reading, not only because of their subject matter but because the narrative tells it how it is. At other times, however, Armstrong appears too carried away by the pathos or heroism of her deeply felt story to apply a critical eye to it. Practical questions go unanswered (how can the Ghetto hospital dress its nurses in neat peppermint-striped uniforms when everyone else is in rags?), while stilted or arch dialogue studded with clunky jokes clogs the characters. Adam, who is supposed to speak good English and is capable of sentences such as ‘Is this what you had in mind when you suggested a romantic stroll in the dark?’, describes himself as ‘the strange man outside’ (odd man out), before coming out with, ‘We go for dinner, yes?’ There are also too many bowls of soup never less than steaming, and smiles that are always mischievous. The predicability of the cigarette case makes one groan, as do the laboured attempts to introduce slang: did Australian flyers ever address their sisters as ‘Sis’, or say, ‘That glamourpuss in the slinky red dress is giving me the once-over ...’?

The main disappointment, however, in this earnest, laborious but worthy narrative, is the plethora of unnecessary explanations tacked on to everything. ‘Adam’s jaw ground back and forth but he said nothing. He needed all his strength to focus on flying the plane.’ The first sentence does it; the second is otiose.

Dedicated to the author’s ‘darling grand-daughters’, was this story written with one eye on them rather than on the adult audience?