El sur

In a drought-stricken plantation, under a sun that seems capable of setting the entire country ablaze, two boys walk among diseased trees soon to be felled. There, amidst the withered undergrowth and the scent of living bark, desire erupts with the same silent violence that hangs over nature. Years later, that moment —brief, clumsy, and irreversible— will continue to cast a long shadow. Tash Aw crafts a coming-of-age novel and a memoir that is also a portrait of a country in transformation. In the late 1990s, the family of Jay, a sixteen-year-old Malaysian boy, travels to the south of the country. His mother, Sui Ching, has inherited a decaying estate from her father-in-law, managed by Fong and his son Chuan, which will become the epicenter of tensions, secrets, and long-postponed revelations. As the drought deepens and the national economy falters, each member of the family must confront their own transformations: Jack projects onto his son a discipline that the world no longer guarantees; Sui Ching finds in this inheritance the possibility of redemption; the daughters, Lina and Yin, explore different forms of escape far from the everyday. And Jay, at the center of it all, silent and observant, navigates the bewilderment of adolescence: the shame of a perpetually growing body and the intuition of a desire that sets him apart from others and that he cannot yet name. Far from the city and the routines that protected him, Jay will be forced to grapple with feelings that begin to take shape in an environment that is both hostile and magnetic.