Early this year, I stumbled on a story in The New Yorker that blew me away. It made me laugh. It intrigued me. It made me think, it made me question. And it got me, deep down, at my emotional core, in a way that no short story has before. It was ‘War Dances’, the titular story of this collection. What’s so special about ‘War Dances’? It’s a strikingly original story about a liberal middle-class Indian American man reflecting on his own mysterious illness (which begins with hearing loss and escalates to a possible brain tumour) and on the death of his father, ‘an alcoholic, diabetic Indian with terminally damaged kidneys’. It’s told in several parts: shifting from a scene in the hospital ward with his father after his feet are amputated, searching for an Indian family to cadge a warm blanket from (‘You’re stereotyping your own damn people,’ says a visitor, who then hands him a blanket); to a stark, blackly humorous ‘Exit Interview With My Father’; to joking on the phone with his wife, who is visiting her mother in Rome, ‘maybe you can plant an eagle feather and claim that you just discovered Catholicism’.

In the first story, ‘Breaking and Entering’, a middle-class Indian man hits a black intruder (a teenager) with a baseball bat and accidentally kills him – and is caught up in a media storm. In another, lighter story, ‘The Ballad of Paul Nonetheless’, a middle-aged hipster tries and fails to connect with the people around him in all the wrong ways – notably, using pop culture and witticisms. Alexie masterfully blends humour, storytelling, politics and humanity, creating gripping characters in the process. His stories confront issues of race and class in America from a nuanced, knowingly complex and necessarily contradictory, standpoint. Buy this book – it’s amazing.