The South
About the book
Author: Tash Aw
Publisher: FSG
More info:
The StoryGraph | Goodreads
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the review.
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Bookshop.org (print or ebook) | Libro.fm (audio)
My review
The South is my penultimate read from the 2025 Booker Prize longlist, and unfortunately it was a bit of a dud for me. But in the book’s defense, I didn’t give it a fully fair shot; I was really, really not in the mood for this style of book when I read it, but I run the book club, so I had to power through! There’s a chance I would have enjoyed it much more if I had had more freedom to approach it with better timing.
The novel (which I believe is at least partly autofiction) is about a gay teenage boy in the late 90s in Malaysia, during a financial crisis. His family spends a few weeks at the decaying farm that his grandfather left to his mother, where he meets and begins a summer fling with the farm’s caretaker’s son (this isn’t a spoiler, it happens in the first chapter). It is fragmentary and sticky like the weather and full of longing.
As I mentioned, the main problem I had was my mood, but there were certain things that added fuel to the fire. For one, I found the prose to occasionally be distracting in how hard it was trying to be profound (it took me out of it). For another, it somewhat experimentally switches between first and third person narration, which made it feel a bit chaotic (and like there were way more than three POV characters), but maybe that was a bit of the point.
My book club also universally agreed that the audiobook did not do this one favors; my diagnosis is that the narrator takes long pauses between sentences but speaks the words more quickly, which made me have to slow the speed down more than my brain wanted, and I zoned out a lot.
At the end of the day, I’m not mad I read it, but I’m also not sure I will continue with this planned quartet unless future books are nominated for prizes. On to the next!
Content and trigger warnings
Homophobia
Incest
Drug abuse (minor)
Infidelity
