Book Review: The South by Tash Aw

 “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Tolstoy’s line fits Tash Aw’s The South perfectly. Where Tan Twan Eng paints the Malayan past in nostalgic tones, Aw strips it bare, leaving only bleakness and hopelessness.

Fong’s failures and Sui’s quiet endurance embody lives chipped away by compromise, survival without joy. Lina offers sharper clarity, a refusal to dissolve into silence, yet even she cannot escape the novel’s despair. Aw denies catharsis; instead he leaves the residue of fractured families, migration, and intimacy worn thin. A haunting novel of unhappiness endured, not overcome.

-Book 59 of 2025-