Published in 2025, and longlisted for that year's Booker Prize (which was ultimately won by David Szalay's Flesh), this is by Malaysian author Tash Aw.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again: Aw gets better and better. Map of the Invisible World and The Harmony Silk Factory didn't entirely gel with me, but I really liked Five Star Billionaire, loved We, the Survivors, and cried a bit over Strangers on a Pier.

And now I'm 100 per cent on board with The South, which -- and I hope this is true -- is supposed to be the first in a series of four.

It's such a quiet, understated book. So outwardly undramatic. And yet it seethes with tensions that spark across every gap you can think of: Sexuality, ethnicity, class, age, financial status, geographical location...

It's the story of the Lim family. Mum and Dad (Sui and Jack), plus two daughters (Lina and Yin, just approaching adulthood), and a son (Jay, about 16), travel to the bottom of the Malaysian peninsula to visit the farm that Sui has inherited from her father-in-law.

The setting is the late 1990s, and what they experience during their visit is not a rural idyll. In fact, the farm is failing, its chances of profitability eroded by drought and recession. Fong, the manager, is short not of ideas and plans, but of funds for fertilizer and insecticide and replacement pumps. Fong's wife long ago flitted to nearby Singapore, leaving him to bring up (or not) their son, Chuan, who's about 19.

I love the way Aw quietly adds detail, like an artist adding dabs with a brush. Bit by bit, he teases out all the complications of this scenario, and makes us care about these people, all struggling in their different ways. Part of the way he achieves this is the combination of narrative positions. We move between first- and close-third-person accounts, between past and present, between points of view -- all the time adding layer upon layer of complexity.



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The novel opens with a sexual encounter between Jay and Chuan. Again, it's very understated. And it's a clever way to begin. We gradually learn more of the self-doubt and confusion that have been building up in Jay, and we're happy that this resolution has been so consensual and straightforward. But narratively, this initial disclosure also stops the "Jay/Chuan, will they/won't they" tension taking over the book. Their relationship is just there in the background. We have no idea what will happen to them long term -- the ending is left open -- but this is very much a book with a gay couple in it, as opposed to a book about a gay couple.

The opening also positions the older narrator. "At that age, what does either of them really know about time?", he asks, looking back at that first experience. Lara Feigel puts this very nicely: "Time lies in wait as a preoccupation that the book will have to confront. This is a story about people who are both waiting for life to begin and living with an intensity they will look back on for ever. Jay is precociously aware of this, drawing his fingers over Chuan's skin, 'trying to work out how he will remember it at a later time, what words he will use to describe it later'... Jay at 16 is already the writer, seeking experience, and the book's preoccupation with memory becomes not so much a theme as a way of life."

I also like Sarah Moorhouse's articulation of this: "The novel focuses on its innocent, impressionable central character, but it is shot through with the cynicism of that same character in maturity. A portrait of the time when everything 'tastes of newness,' The South is also a reminder of how brief that phase of possibility is, if we are granted it at all. Jay's sister, Lina, warns him: 'take your time. But not too much. Because you have less of it than you think.'"


The bottom end of the peninsula: Johor Bahru, 2010

Two things here:

Firstly, the relationship between Jay and Chuan is the one that got the book into trouble in Malaysia. I don't think it was officially banned, but complaints were filed, and pressure was exerted, and book shop displays were adjusted... This reviewer goes to Singapore to find a copy... And he laments: "Malaysia's criminalisation of queer relationships (enshrined in both civil and Shariah law) often justifies itself through moral panic, as though the mere presence of such narratives will destabilise society. Yet Aw's novel demonstrates the opposite: that literature can hold complexity without threat, and that acknowledging diversity in human relationships is not an erosion of culture but an honest reflection of it."

Secondly, "Jay is a substitute for me," Aw tells Alex Clark: "I'm trying to recreate how I understood life at that point, and the answer is that I didn't." Hence his "subversion" of the narrative form into different times and voices: "Because I don't think people think of their lives in terms of a continuous or coherent narrative. I think we experience life in a very fragmented way."

Aw, of course, is also imbued with the Chinese Malaysian experience: "'Before I even knew what it was to be gay, I knew what it was to be Chinese, and I knew what it was to be hated because you were Chinese,' he says. This trifecta of experiences -- a family tending towards silence, antipathy towards the Chinese, and an emerging sense of his queerness -- led to an ability to pass beneath the radar, to become invisible in potentially hostile situations. But ultimately, he believes, the danger of decentring yourself is self-erasure."



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I felt very much for the young people in The South, all trying, in their different ways, to shape a future. Lina just wants to move on -- not only away from her family, and through her studies, but also into a creative career and overseas. Yin's boyfriend is Malay, and Lina warns her that his family will never accept someone who's not only less rich but also Chinese. Heartbreak ahead, perhaps. Chuan is the savviest of them all, but also the most limited. With little in the way of schooling or skills or funding, he's going to struggle, just like his father, to make it out of the slow lane.

And Jay -- well, he's just figuring it all out: What it means to feel at ease in his body, to love someone, to be a man, to find his place in the world. He's desperately sad and angry that his parents plan to sell the farm, and runs off wildly to confront them. But Chuan restrains him. Later, says the narrator, they will laugh at his immaturity, and more generally "at the ridiculous younger versions of ourselves". But we never leave everything behind... "Even then," says the narrator, "I knew that I would never fully be able to distance myself from the person I was at that precise moment, trapped by his own frustration, inexplicably powerless, incapable of exerting willpower over a situation, of finding a light-hearted thing to say, of shrugging off mishap."

Jay also has to learn the economic realities of life. As Moorhouse points out, "Being gay means something different for Jay than it does for Chuan, for instance. Jay, a product of his parents' urban upward mobility, muses to Chuan that maybe they 'would be able to hold hands in the street one day, somewhere … where people were too busy to wonder why we were holding hands.' For Chuan, who has grown up without education or money, other things are higher on the priority list. His reply: 'Don't you have better things to think about in life?'"

A couple of times, we have very poignant descriptions of refuge-like places. Near Jay's school, for example, there's a clearing that's encircled by thick undergrowth and shaded by the trees overhead: "This place offers respite, not just to me but to other like me... In the future, I will find myself in similar spaces... and I will remember this clearing, with its particular scent of loneliness, remember the melancholy that feels like an experience shared by everyone who visits this space."

Later, Chuan takes Jay and his sisters to a kind of cave he's discovered, a hide-out probably built by Chinese communists who'd lived on the edge of the forest during the "Emergency". He says he felt instantly at home there: "It was a place built by people who didn't fit in elsewhere... We talked in hushed tones about how it must have felt to be a semi-fugitive, being on the margins. Some of the people who hid in this place would have had boring lives -- shopkeepers, journalists, mechanics -- but lived in fear of being unmasked as communists... How long could you keep your secret? One day you have an ordinary family life, next day you're on the run, hiding in a cave, eating tins of biscuits."

People's lives... Secrets and refuges, ostracism and shelter, places that are not ideal, but are better than nothing...


Muar, not far from Johor, 2017

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I also had tremendous sympathy for Sui. Her wedding photo says it all. The groom is 15 years older than she is (he was formerly her teacher); his suit is "as dull as you would imagine of a man like him, the mathematics teacher who found clothes and ceremony trivial", whereas she's "striking a pose with her hand on her hip as though on a cover of one of those magazines for modern women imported from Hong Kong or Japan or Australia". The narrator insists: "They could have been born in different eras altogether -- he in a previous century, she dragged back in time from the next millennium. The contrast was so great that they appeared to be not so much a union but a collision."

Sui and Jack are not just of different temperaments, but also from different classes (her family is rural and poor, its members ignorant even of what to do at the wedding celebration, while his family exudes "shiny elegance"). She longs to escape her hick rellies, who constantly embarrass her. But she "escapes" into a life where she's scorned. Her in-laws look down on her; her husband doesn't respect her, and cheats on her. You get the impression that Sui could have been so, so, so much more, if she hadn't languished in the shade of Jack.

It's hard to feel for Jack, but you do, a little bit... He has channelled his life into teaching, but no longer fits in, and has lost his job. His artistic proclivities seem to have been squashed somewhere along the line. Still, he has threatened Sui with violence at least once, and he's often cold and dismissive towards his children. It seems he's attuned only to himself: "It was as if all his sensitivity to life was channelled inwards, with none left for anyone else." And he is absolutely not the sort of guy you can reason with... He makes decisions, end of story.

It's quite a while before we realize that Jack and Fong are half-brothers. The role of the dice... One son is legitimate, and grows up in reasonable comfort; the other is illegitimate, and struggles all his life. One doles out the money, until he won't any more; the other stands cap in hand, until he's suddenly homeless. Jay muses, "How can we live in a place when we know that it belongs to someone else? We believe it is our home, we allow our roots to settle in its soil -- for how can we not? We know no other place." How many layers there are for Malaysians in that little quote...

Of course, there's an environmental subtext here, too. Sections of the plot have been sold off, but they've been left to go wild (acquired by former immigrants who value land as something to hand down the generations, but of zero value to grandchildren who -- as Chuan puts it -- want an apartment in the city, as opposed to "this lousy little field in the middle of nowhere".

At one point, someone had attempted to construct holiday chalets, designed as weekend escapes for Singaporeans. They've been left half-finished, Fong explains, because after the 1997 crisis, no-one had any money: "The whole country was full of unfinished developments like that. Reality couldn't keep up with our dreams, he laughed. 'Why do people do that,' Lina grumbled... 'All that destruction of forests and digging up of earth for shitty houses for the middle classes to take their holidays -- and they can't even finish what they started?'" Yeah, good point...



Malaysia, with all its joys and sorrows, zings out from these pages. I have stood in quiet places on the peninsula, conscious of the heat and the crackling dryness; I know very well the kind of riverside eatery where the kids end up at one point. My outsider's experience can never equate to Aw's or his Malaysian readers', but it's a powerful evocation all the same.

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I'll close with a quote from Richard Scott Larson, which encapsulates so much of what I loved about this book: "There are novels of incident and novels of pathos, and The South is certainly more steeped in the latter, as its narrative of one character's irrevocable refusal of the blinders of childhood mirrors that of the quiet passing into history of a lost time and place. 'That was how memory worked; it was the opposite of recollection,' Jay observes, 'never as strong as we thought it was, always relinquishing the instances that mattered most to us.' He's telling us that something remarkable in youth -- even perhaps our first taste of love and desire -- becomes forgettable over the passing of time. The power of The South is in its enactment of this truism, its narrator always keenly aware that the people we might have once been in the past are already long dead."

It's always a pleasure to read something this good. I'm already looking forward to the next one...