The South

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.

CHOSEN AS A TIMES, GUARDIAN and FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF 2025.

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.

About the Author

Tash Aw was born in Taipei, in the Republic of China, andbrought up in Malaysia. He moved to England in his teens andnow 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 most recent novel, ‘Five Star Billionaire’, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2013.