The South

Susan Midalia's Review 

Born in Taiwan, raised in Malaysia and educated in the UK, Tash Aw is probably best known for his Booker-longlisted debut novel The Harmony Silk Factory. His new novel The South, set in rural Malaysia in the late 1990s, explores the lives of two generations of related families dwelling in the shadow of the devastating collapse of the Asian financial markets. The main character, sixteen-year-old Jay Lim, has travelled with his parents and two older sisters to a small farm unexpectedly bequeathed to Jay’s mother in her father-in-law’s will. Run down to the point of ruin, the farm is evidence of the country’s declining rural sector, and a symbol of both doomed adult nostalgia and a disillusioning reality which the younger generation is determined to escape. Adding to the novel’s treatment of change is the Chinese ethnicity of the Lim family; while the older generation feels obliged to marry a person from their own culture, daughter Yin struggles with her feelings for a Malaysian boy.

The novel skilfully weaves these economic, social and historical contexts into what is essentially a queer coming-of-age narrative about Jay’s growing attraction to twenty-year-old Chuan, the son of the hapless farm manager, Fong. This meeting of opposites between the relatively innocent, bookish Jay and the school drop-out and local misfit Chaun is narrated retrospectively, such that the voice of the adult Jay – lucid, clear-eyed and slightly jaded – intermittently foreshadows the end of a summer of bodily pleasure and friendship. The shift in narration between first and third person adds to the impression of Jay looking back on a much younger and uncertain self. He is also a keen observer of his parents’ broken marriage. In a dynamic that mirrors the class differences between Jay and Chaun, Jay’s father Jack is an intellectual and his wife Sui is a relatively uneducated country girl. And while Jay’s perspective dominates the novel, those sections seen from his mother’s point of view reveal the loss of her youthful hopes and her stoic resignation to marital unhappiness. Jay’s father is an equally compelling portrait of emotional stultification and authoritarianism which his daughter Yin tries to navigate for the sake of her mother, and against which his daughter Lina rebels.

The South is also vividly descriptive and atmospheric in its creation of the physical world: the sights, sounds and smells of the farm, and of the lake in which the Jay, his siblings and Chaung find a temporary freedom. The bustle of the markets and the noise of bars in town; the claustrophobia of the Lim family’s shabby farmhouse. Tonally, the novel veers between a languid sense of suspended time and impending violence or catastrophe, as the characters grapple with their unspoken regrets and hidden desires.

This absorbing, emotionally restrained portrait of family life, impelled by character development rather than plot, is both timeless and specific to its time and place. Aw is currently working on a follow-up novel: the second stage of a quartet that promises to combine an intimate view of personal relationships with an epic treatment of social and cultural change over several generations. I am keen to follow the stories of these fractured, yearning and utterly engaging characters and the new social forces with which they must inevitably contend.

I can highly recommend The South, now available in the Lane Bookshop. 

Publisher's Review 

A radiant novel of the longing that blooms between two boys over the course of one summer – about family, desire, and what we inherit – from celebrated author Tash Aw.

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

'Shimmeringly intelligent and elegiacally intimate' - YIYUN LI

CHOSEN AS A TIMES, GUARDIAN and FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF 2025.

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 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.