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A radiant, intimate novel of the longing that blooms between two boys over the course of one summer―about family, desire, and what we inherit.
When his grandfather dies, Jay travels south with his family to the property they've inherited, a once flourishing farm that has fallen into disrepair. The trees are diseased, the fields parched from months of drought.
Jay's father, Jack, sends him out to work the land, or whatever land is left. Over the course of these hot, dense days, Jay finds himself drawn to Chuan, the son of the farm's manager, different from him in every way except for one.
Out in the fields, and on the streets into town, the charge between the boys intensifies. Inside the house, the other family members begin to confront their own secrets and regrets. Jack is a professor at a struggling local college whose failures might have begun when he married his student, Sui Ching. Sui Ching does her best to keep the family together, though she too wonders what her life could have been. And Fong, the manager, refuses to look at what is: at Chuan, at the land, at the global forces that threaten to render his whole life obsolete.
At once sweeping and compressed, Tash Aw's The South is a family novel of change and desire―a story of what happens when public and private lives collide, told with uncommon grace and beauty.
Booker Longlist announced!
How many of these have you read? Love Forms by Claire Adam The South by Tash Aw Universality by Natasha Brown One Boat by Jonathan Buckley Flashlight by Susan Choi The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai Audition by Kati...
-kim.kovacs
What are you reading this week? (5/15/2025)
I'm reading an ARC of The South by Tash Aw. It's great!
-Stephanie_P
"Aw offers a clear view into the characters' inner lives, revealing their aching desires and the secret relationships and personal crises they hide from each other. In addition to the perceptive characterizations, Aw uses rich symbolism...This masterwork of psychological realism brings to mind the classic novels of E.M. Forster." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A somber, slow-moving coming-of-age tale." —Kirkus Reviews
"A sublime novel from one of the most important writers of our present." ―Édouard Louis, author of Change
"Tash Aw's The South is a mesmerizing tale of love, courage, and endurance, infused with humor, longing, and other aspects of humanity too subtle to be named. And, like any significant novel, it's both heartbreaking and joyful." ―Michael Cunningham, author of Day
"Tash Aw presents a world as timeless as the worlds brought to us by Turgenev and V. S. Naipaul, and yet catches the subtle and unstoppable changes each generation faces. Reflecting the human entanglements that come with home, land, and homeland, The South is a shimmeringly intelligent and elegiacally intimate novel." ―Yiyun Li, author of Wednesday's Child
This information about The South was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Tash Aw is the author of four novels, including We, the Survivors, and a memoir of a Chinese-Malaysian family, Strangers on a Pier, both finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His work has also won the Whitbread and Commonwealth Prizes, an O. Henry Award and twice been longlisted for the MAN Booker Prize. His fiction has been translated into 23 languages.
Name Pronunciation
Tash Aw: "Tash" rhymes with "ash." "Aw" like the word "awe."
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