South, Babak Lakghomi
South, Babak Lakghomi
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South
A Novel

Author: Babak Lakghomi

Narrator: Shawn K. Jain

Unabridged: 3 hr 52 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/21/2024

Categories: Fiction, Dystopian, Political


Synopsis

South is a hallucinatory reimagination of life in a world under totalitarianism, and an individual's quest for truth, agency, and understanding.

"A quiet meditation on imagination and reality, absence and presence, and the world around us. Lakghomi achieves a poetic and hypnotic effect with his tightly constructed, spare prose." —Brandon Hobson, author of The Removed

"A Lynchian descent into the paranoia and alienation of totalitarianism, South is a haunting and dreamlike novel" —SHELF AWARENESS

B, a journalist, travels to the South of an unnamed desert country for a mysterious mission to write a report about the recent strikes on an offshore oil rig. From the beginning of his trip, he is faced with a cruel and broken landscape of drought and decay, superstitious believers of evil winds and spirits, and corrupt entities focused on manipulation and censorship. As he tries to defend himself against his unknown enemies, we learn about his father's disappearance, his fading love with his wife, and his encounter with an unknown woman. A puzzle-like novel about totalitarianism, surveillance, alienation, and guilt that questions the forces that control us.

About Babak Lakghomi

Babak Lakghomi is the author of Floating Notes. His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, NOON, Ninth Letter, New York Tyrant, and Green Mountains Review, and has been translated into Italian and Farsi. Babak was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives and writes in Toronto.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Glenn

Harrowing, haunting, and, at points, hallucinogenic. South is Babak Lakghomi's gripping novel about a journalist traveling south on assignment from an unnamed city to investigate what's happening on the oil rigs in the Persian Gulf. Although the city is probably Tehran and the country Iran (the autho......more

Goodreads review by Kate

I know a lot of people won't agree but this book reminded me of Kafka. All those twists and turns but all leading back to the same point. It never seemed to matter where the writer, B, went, he always ended up hiding or being held by someone. It's never clear who he is afraid of or what the authorit......more

Goodreads review by Dee

3.5* The whole whats really happening approach for this novel had me reading on quickly. I needed to find out where it was going to lead to or what it would uncover. I felt the main character was confusing yet really intriguing. His mind would go in so many directions and the story would twist so mu......more

Goodreads review by Thomas

Written in exquisitely controlled prose ranging from the syncopative and percussive to the ambiguously haunting, Lakghomi's novel explores borders and thresholds and the indeterminate horizons where truth and power intervene upon one another in the peripheral visions of individuals approaching/searc......more