Tash Aw for The South

Twice Booker longlisted author Tash Aw joins us for his new book The South, a radiant novel of the longing that blooms between two boys over the course of one summer. This is a mesmerising story about family, desire, and what we inherit.

Tash 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.

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's masterful portrait of a family navigating a period of great change - a reimagined epic for our times.

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.

'Shimmeringly intelligent and elegiacally intimate' YIYUN LI

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