The South
Published on 12. February 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
288 pages
978-0-00-863764-4 (ISBN)
Description
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025
'Spellbinding' THE TIMES
'An exquisite, languorous novel' OBSERVER
'Heartstoppingly vivid' OISIN MCKENNA
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.
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.
'Spellbinding' THE TIMES
'An exquisite, languorous novel' OBSERVER
'Heartstoppingly vivid' OISIN MCKENNA
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
'A spellbinding novel by a Malaysian heir to Chekhov. A book that reveals Aw's greatest strength as a novelist - an ability to subtly shift and unsettle your perceptions of characters and situations' The Times'This may be Booker-longlisted Tash Aw's best book yet. Mesmerising'London Standard
'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
'The South is a mesmerising 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. It's both heartbreaking and joyful' Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours
'A sublime novel from one of the most important writers of our present' Edouard Louis, author of The End of Eddy
'Everything about this novel is heartstoppingly vivid: its physical and emotional and social landscapes are rendered in sumptuous, shocking detail, while its meditations on desire and family are ecstatic and devastating all at once. It's exquisite' Oisin McKenna, author of Evenings and Weekends
'A novel of shimmering beauty, of exquisite tenderness and longing' Andrew McMillan, author of Playtime
'An exquisite, languorous novel about class and aspiration, family and growing up'Observer
'The South blooms as an epic, unconstrained by chronology or fate. Fluent in the vocabulary of change, Tash Aw's fifth novel gifts us a radiant and generous vision of our relationship to home, love and ourselves. I wanted to live in it forever - even knowing what I do now, about time' Jemimah Wei, author of The Original Daughter
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
HarperCollins Publishers
Product notice
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 197 mm
Width: 127 mm
Thickness: 19 mm
Weight
198 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-00-863764-4 (9780008637644)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Person
Tash Aw is the author of four novels, including We, the Survivors, and a memoir of a Chinese-Malaysian family, Strangers on a Pier, both finalists for the Los Angeles Book Prize. His work has also won the Whitbread and Commonwealth Prizes, an O. Henry Award and twice been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His fiction has been translated into twenty-three languages.