The South
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- 18,99 €
Descrição da editora
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025
'Spellbinding' THE TIMES
'An exquisite, languorous novel' OBSERVER
'Heartstoppingly vivid' OISÍN 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.
About the author
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The stellar latest from Aw (The Harmony Silk Factory) chronicles a sensitive boy's coming-of-age and his family's private pain. "Wayward" adolescent Jay is the youngest of the Lim family, who leave their unnamed Malaysian city during his summer break from high school for their small farm in the south. Aw evokes a mood of pervasive decline, describing the financial troubles plaguing the country, the farm's economic problems, and the deterioration of family patriarch Jack, a severe, unlikable math teacher. Against this melancholy backdrop, Aw masterfully juxtaposes the hopes and desires of the younger generation, crystallized in the tender, slow-burning relationship between Jay and a slightly older and stronger boy named Chuan, son of the farm's manager. Questions of how to manage one's inheritance, whether of material assets or emotional baggage, are central to the novel, as Aw explores how the characters, especially Jay's mother, Sui, feel indebted and trapped. Through alternating close-third perspective, and occasional first-person passages from Jay, Aw offers a clear view into the characters' inner lives, revealing their aching desires and the secret relationships and personal crises they hide from each other. In addition to the perceptive characterizations, Aw uses rich symbolism, such as the Lims' ever-present tamarind grove, alive and beautiful but terminally diseased. This masterwork of psychological realism brings to mind the classic novels of E.M. Forster.
