Billed as the first of a Proustian quartet, Tash Aw’s fifth novel The South is a new departure for the London-based Malaysian writer renowned for his empathy and intelligence.
Distilling the complex vision of previous Man Booker Prize longlisted novels such as Five Star Billionaire into a Chekhovian world of a single summer in rural south Malaysia in the 1990s, Aw tells the tale of Jay and his family as they move from the city to the country to manage his grandfather’s dilapidated fruit farm.
Like Chekhov’s Russia, Aw’s Malaysia is both a universally resonant vision of a timeless and placeless lost world and an historically precise portrait of a country undergoing rapid modernisation, its economy and climate at tipping point.
Aw’s “compressed, exquisite” writing (The Guardian) can “subtly shift and unsettle your perception of character and situations” (The Times).
His vivid depiction of the physical, emotional and social landscapes of first love and family dynamics is also “shimmeringly intelligent,” overlayered by the shifting perspective of time and memory.
Tash Aw will be in conversation with novelist Kate Weinberg.
