Chosen as a Times, Guardian and Financial Times book of 2025
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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. The new literary coming-of-age novel from Booker Prize-longlisted 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.
“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
“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
“The South is a sublime novel from one of the most important writers of our present.”
—Édouard 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.”
—Oisín McKenna, author of Evenings and Weekends
“A novel of shimmering beauty, of exquisite tenderness and longing.”
—Andrew McMillan, author of Physical and Playtime
“An exquisite, languorous novel about class and aspiration, family and growing up.”
—Observer
“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
Tash Aw was born in Taipei, in the Republic of China, and brought up in Malaysia. He moved to England in his teens and now lives in London. He is the author of The Harmony Silk Factory, which was the winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Novel and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Map of the Invisible World. His novel, Five Star Billionaire, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2013.
