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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.
"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 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 was born in Taipei to Malaysian parents. He grew up in Kuala Lumpur before moving to Britain to attend university. He is the author of three critically acclaimed novels – The Harmony Silk Factory (2005), which won the Whitbread First Novel Award and a regional Commonwealth Writers' Prize; Map of the Invisible World (2009) and Five Star Billionaire (2013) – and a work of non-fiction, The Face: Strangers on a Pier (2016), finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. His novels have twice been longlisted for the MAN Booker prize and been translated into 23 languages.
His work has won an O. Henry Prize and been published in The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, A Public Space and the landmark Granta 100, amongst others. He is also a contributing opinion writer for the ...
... Full Biography
Link to Tash Aw's Website
Name Pronunciation
Tash Aw: "Tash" rhymes with "ash." "Aw" like the word "awe."
Dictators ride to and fro on tigers from which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.
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