The South A Novel

Long-listed for the Booker Prize

Some books arrive like a whisper. Others, like a wave. Tash Aw’s The South is both—a radiant, intimate novel that lingers long after you’ve turned the final page.

When Jay travels south with his family to claim his grandfather’s inheritance, he finds a farm dying in the heat. The trees are diseased. The fields, cracked and thirsty. His father, Jack, sends him out to work what’s left of the land, and it’s there—in the dense, humid days—that Jay meets Chuan, the farm manager’s son. Different in every way except one. The charge between them builds slowly, inevitably, like summer itself.

But this isn’t just Jay’s story. Inside the house, the family begins to unravel its own secrets. Jack, a professor whose career has stalled, wonders where it all went wrong. His wife, Sui Ching—once his student—holds the family together while quietly mourning the life she didn’t choose. And Fong, the manager, refuses to see what’s coming: the end of a way of life, the world changing faster than he can keep up.

Aw writes with uncommon grace about family, desire, and the inheritance we can’t escape. The South is sweeping yet compressed, a story of collision—between generations, between what we want and what we’re given, between private longing and public lives.

Perfect for readers who loved The Swimmers or The God of Small Things.

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