The South - by Tash Aw (Hardcover)

About the Book

An "intimate novel of the longing that blooms between two boys over the course of one summer--about family, desire, and what we inherit"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Aw allows much to remain unknown, uncertain, or unsaid in The South, and he does so beautifully . . . A strong opening for Aw's projected quartet, a quiet yet expansive novel, and it's with great anticipation that I discovered that he is already hard at work on the second installment. If the first book is anything to go by, there is a lot to look forward to."
--Ilana Masad, Los Angeles Times

"Sensitively drawn . . . Gorgeously rendered . . . Aw develops a story that is [universal]: about land ownership, the shadings of class and ethnic difference, legacy, globalism, youth and love."
--Claude Peck, Minneapolis Star Tribune

"The South is an heartbreaking and elegant look into the power of place and the lives who call it home."
--Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books

"The stellar latest from Aw . . . Aw masterfully juxtaposes the hopes and desires of the younger generation, crystallized in the tender, slow-burning relationship . . . This masterwork of psychological realism brings to mind the classic novels of E.M. Forster."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Like Chekhov's Russia, Aw's Malaysia is both a universally resonant vision of a timeless and placeless lost world, and a historically precise portrait of a country undergoing rapid modernisation.... [Aw] emerg[es] as a Proustian chronicler of momentary bodily and mental experience writing on a compressed, exquisite scale . . . blending the timeless and the historical to reinvent what an epic can be."
--Lara Feigel, The Guardian (UK)

"[A] spellbinding story about a group of people navigating a period of upheaval . . . that reveals Aw's greatest strength as a novelist -- an ability to subtly shift and unsettle your perceptions."
--Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Times (UK)

"A universal and mesmerising tale of family dynamics, first experiences of longing, and the subtle social and cultural changes that each generation has to grapple with."
--The New Statesman

"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

About the Author

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.