“Tash Aw’s The South is a mesmerizing tale of love, courage, and endurance. Like any significant novel, it’s also infused with humor, longing, and other aspects of humanity too subtle and pervasive to be named by me. And, like any significant novel, it’s both heartbreaking and joyful.”
—Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours and Day

“Tash 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, award-winning author of Wednesday’s Child

“A sublime novel from one of the most important writers of our present.”
—Édouard Louis, author of Change and The End of Eddy

"Stellar. . . . Evokes a mood of pervasive decline, [but against] this melancholy backdrop, Aw masterfully juxtaposes the hopes and desires of the younger generation. . . . This masterwork of psychological realism brings to mind the classic novels of E.M. Forster."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“The South . . . soaks us in bodily intimacy from the outset…. Aw is brilliant at compressing sociological insight into intimate scenes. . . . Aw has moved beyond his previous novels to discover a different kind of writing here, emerging as a Proustian chronicler of momentary bodily and mental experience writing on a compressed, exquisite scale. Perhaps he will follow Proust in using his newly revealed capacity for blending the timeless and the historical to reinvent what an epic can be.”
—The Guardian