
The South
A Novel
Author: Tash Aw
Narrator: Windson Liong
Unabridged: 7 hr 1 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Dreamscape Media
Published: 05/27/2025
Categories: Fiction, Lgbtq+, Family Life, Literary Fiction

Author: Tash Aw
Narrator: Windson Liong
Unabridged: 7 hr 1 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Dreamscape Media
Published: 05/27/2025
Categories: Fiction, Lgbtq+, Family Life, Literary Fiction
Tash Aw is the author of Map of the Invisible World and The Harmony Silk Factory, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Novel and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His other honors include the inaugural M Literary Residency Prize and an O. Henry Award. Tash lives in London.
Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025 Great plot idea, lackluster execution: Aw's main character Jay looks back on the year 1997, when he spent a fateful holiday on the family farm in the South of his home country of Malaysia. His mother Sui Ching, the child of migrants, has inherited the farm near Jo......more
A possible Booker winner A coming-of-age novel, a surprisingly tender love story that, at the start, reminded me of my first read of Call Me by Your Name. I think it isn’t easy to create a suave gay love story set in adolescence, especially in a place like Malaysia, where gay people face even more st......more
This is easily the best of what I've read coming out in 2025 so far. This is the first novel I've read by Tash Aw, and as it is the first in a planned quartet, I somehow doubt it will be the last! Set in Malaysia, in an undisclosed time, we follow Jay, our protagonist, and his two sisters and parent......more
My hot take is that this is quiet and gentle and there’s some really meditative growing up, complicated family dynamics vibes here, but it just didn’t capture me like I wanted it to. I really felt there was a lot of setting up happening for the rest of this series of novels. The tension rose in the......more
#8 of the Booker longlist for me. Had never read any Aw before, and although this is the first in a planned tetralogy, I have no great desire to spend any more time with any of these characters. Not that this book is actively bad - it just was kind of 'meh' - although the characters are suitably defi......more