The South

Tash Aw author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:HarperCollins Publishers

Publishing:13th Feb '25

£16.99

This title is due to be published on 13th February, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

The South cover

'Shimmeringly intelligent and elegiacally intimate' YIYUN LI

'A mesmerising tale. Both heartbreaking and joyful' MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

A radiant novel of 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.

'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 mesmerizing 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

ISBN: 9780008637606

Dimensions: 222mm x 141mm x 22mm

Weight: 270g

304 pages