Longing blooms between two boys over the course of one summer in this “mesmerizing tale of love, courage, and endurance, infused with humor, longing, and other aspects of humanity too subtle to be named” (Michael Cunningham).
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 are parched from months of drought.
Jay’s father, Jack, sends him out to work the land, or whatever is left of it. Over the course of the hot, dense days, Jay finds himself drawn to Chuan, the son of the farm’s manager, who is different from him in every way except one.
Out in the fields and on the streets in 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 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 else her life could have been. And Fong, the farm’s manager, refuses to see what is: Chuan, the land, the global forces that threaten to render his whole life obsolete.
At once sweeping and compact, Tash Aw’sThe Southis a family novel of change and desire—a story told with uncommon grace and beauty about what happens when public and private lives collide
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Tash Awis the author of four novels, including We, the Survivors, and a memoir of a Chinese-Malaysian family, The Face: Strangers on a Pier, both finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His work has also won a Whitbread Award, a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and an O. Henry Prize, and has twice been long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. His fiction has been translated into twenty-three languages.
