Description

‘Shimmeringly intelligent and elegiacally intimate’ YIYUN LI

‘A mesmerising tale. Both heartbreaking and joyful’ MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

A radiant novel of the longing that blooms between two boys over the course of one summer – about family, desire, and what we inherit – from celebrated author Tash Aw.

When his grandfather dies, a boy named Jay travels south with his family to the property he left them, a once flourishing farm that has fallen into disrepair. The trees are diseased, the fields parched from months of drought.

Still, 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 confront their own regrets, and begin to drift apart. Like the land around them, they are powerless to resist the global forces that threaten to render their lives obsolete.

At once sweeping and intimate, The South is a story of what happens when private and public lives collide. It is the first in a quartet of novels that form Tash Aw’s masterful portrait of a family navigating a period of great change – a reimagined epic for our times.

Publisher Review

‘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

‘Tash Aw’s The South is a mesmerising tale of love, courage, and endurance. Like any significant novel, it’s also infused with humour, longing, and other aspects of humanity too subtle and pervasive to be named by me. And, like any significant novel, it’s both heartbreaking and joyful’ Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours and Day

‘The South is a sublime novel from one of the most important writers of our present’ Edouard Louis, author of The End of Eddy and Change

‘Everything about this novel is heartstoppingly vivid: its physical and emotional and social landscapes are rendered in sumptuous, shocking detail, while its meditations on desire and family are ecstatic and devastating all at once. It’s exquisite’ Oisin McKenna, author of Evenings and Weekends

‘In this miraculous antidote of a novel, a return voyage to forgotten lands plunges us into the heart of a family’s generational tango with emotional and pragmatic desires, all while the world around them morphs. Every charged moment, every plucked fruit, every decayed awning illuminates a world acutely aware of time’s passage, yet The South blooms as an epic, unconstrained by chronology or fate. Fluent in the vocabulary of change, Tash Aw’s fifth novel gifts us a radiant and generous vision of our relationship to home, love, and ourselves. I wanted to live in it forever – even knowing what I do now, about time’ Jemimah Wei, author of The Original Daughter