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The South

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The South

By: Tash Aw
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About this listen

'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 local 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.

©2025 Tash Aw (P)2025 HarperCollins Publishers
Coming of Age Family Life Literary Fiction
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Critic reviews

'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

'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

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