The South

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025 'Spellbinding' THE TIMES 'An exquisite, languorous novel' OBSERVER 'Heartstoppingly vivid' OISÍN MCKENNA

‘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' Édouard 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' Oisín 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

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.