About

Mr B's Emporium is thrilled to welcome a longstanding Team B favourite, author Tash Aw, to Mr B's to discuss his stunning new novel, The South.

The South is a sweeping and intimate novel of the longing that blooms between two boys over the course of one summer in Malaysia—about family, desire, and what we inherit. 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. Already one of our favourite books for 2025, we can't wait to welcome Tash to Bath and hear more about this radiant new novel.

Tash Aw was born in Taipei, in the Republic of China, and brought up in Malaysia. He is the author of two seminal Mr B's favourites including The Harmony Silk Factory, and Five Star Billionaire, both of which were longlisted for the Booker Prize. His memoir, Strangers on a Pier was published in 2021 to huge critical acclaim, praised by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Deborah Levy.

About the book:

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 local 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.

'Shimmeringly intelligent and elegiacally intimate' YIYUN LI

'A mesmerising tale. Both heartbreaking and joyful' MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

'The South is a sublime novel from one of the most important writers of our present' ÉDOUARD LOUIS