The South, Tash Aw
The South, Tash Aw
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The South
A Novel

Author: Tash Aw

Narrator: Windson Liong

Unabridged: 7 hr 1 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/27/2025


Synopsis

A radiant, intimate novel of the longing that blooms between two boys over the course of one summer—about family, desire, and what we inherit.When his grandfather dies, Jay travels south with his family to the property they’ve inherited, a once flourishing farm that has fallen into disrepair. The trees are diseased, the fields parched from months of drought.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 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 begin to confront their own secrets and regrets. Jack is a professor at a struggling local college whose failures might have begun when he married his student, Sui Ching. Sui Ching does her best to keep the family together, though she too wonders what her life could have been. And Fong, the manager, refuses to look at what is: at Chuan, at the land, at the global forces that threaten to render his whole life obsolete.At once sweeping and compressed, Tash Aw’s The South is a family novel of change and desire—a story of what happens when public and private lives collide, told with uncommon grace and beauty.

About Tash Aw

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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Meike on August 01, 2025

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

Goodreads review by Flo on August 08, 2025

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

Goodreads review by Emma on November 09, 2024

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

Goodreads review by Claire on August 09, 2025

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

Goodreads review by Doug on August 13, 2025

#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