THE SOUTH, Booker-Prize longlisted first queer love in Malaysia

THE SOUTH
TASH AW
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

One of The Guardian's The best fiction of 2025 list!

Time's The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 selection

A New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025 selection

Longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A luminous and intimate novel about the weight of inheritance, the bonds of loyalty, and the awakening of love, set against the backdrop of a changing Malaysia.

The South unfolds during a visit by the Lim family to their rural clan estate after a long absence. Jay, in his mid-teens, and his two older sisters are less than thrilled to leave their city for the remote house in the south, but their parents, Sui Ching and Jack, are adamant.

Jay finds he's expected to share a room with Chuan, the son of the estate's overseer, a bit older than Jay but seemingly much more mature and capable in the world. The two soon form an intense bond, but with their very different backgrounds, and even more disparate expectations for the future, the course of their relationship is always an unspoken question.

Meanwhile, change presses in, including the destruction of the farm's beloved orchards, and the sale of the estate is mooted. The relationships between Chuan's father and Jack and Sui Ching go deep, but pressures both internal and external threaten to sever old bonds and upend an entire way of life. The South, at once sweeping and intimate, is a masterful portrait of a family navigating a period of great transformation.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Farms feed us. At the vast, unceasing exaction of labor, they feed us. Do they feed farmers? That is, do farmers get fulfillment and satisfaction from the labor they do? (Are there people being farmers in 2025?) And the cost of that labor, the relationships it bends to exigencies city-dwelling consumers don't worry their pretty heads about, how is it borne? Never equally...Nature seems to forbid anything like ease in farming, droughts, excesses of rain, it is literally always something on the socially elite Lim family's inherited land.

Author Tash Aw has done that thinking in this story. He observes and occasionally examines the workings of a family with a farm in Malaya (as it was at the beginning of the narrative) as they farm, live, love, doubt, together and apart. It's a book of calm, eerie stillness as the characters live lives they begin to question...is this necessary? am I necessary to it? am I doing good for the world?...and analyze how things are and aren't making them happy. Love is in the air between boys whose families have known each other most all their lives; loves slides out of mom Sui and dad Jack's grasp; love, true to its reputation, ruins everything with its exquisite torturous promises of pleasure, happiness, belonging that are so elusive to the Lim siblings. “We feel as though our entire world changes when we get older, every object, every person, has been rearranged into some strange new configuration, but in fact nothing at all has changed.” Nor will it ever. That realization stymies and disheartens many. I find it exhilarating in its challenge to redistribute attention, wisdom, knowledge within the unchanging reality of Life.

Maybe Jay Lim won't get Chuan, the boy he loves (In that moment, forever seems like a comforting notion. But at that age, what does either of them really know about time?), maybe Jack Lim will stop him as his culture demands despite his own complicated past, maybe Sui Lim won't be able to move past regrets for things undone. Maybe Malaysia's long tradition of relative harmony among its constituent groups is about to blow up into full-on Sinophobia. What will the Lims do then? We can't call it an orchard if it no longer bears fruits pretty much sums up the dilemmas in the whole book.

Family drama is evergreen because family is universal. Jay's older sisters are plumping for connection in the form of religious nuttery, the other in the embrace of rejection. (Parents believe this, so she rejects it; a stance adolescence damn near demands.) Jay's struggles with finding queerness in his world, knowing it's there and just out of his reach, is how I know the author understands me across generations and cultures: "This emptiness feels like hunger but Jay thinks that it is really a longing, though he doesn't know what he is longing for."

I was delighted to read this story of queer self-discovery against a backdrop of cultural and economic shifts that both enable and inhibit the journey. It is not a negative, but an observation, that hearing from so many points of view does not center queerness in the story quite the way I'd thought it would based on how it's marketed. It wasn't enough Jay to make the queer angle the only one in the telling, so I took three-quarters of a star back.

But how very beautiful and quietly profound and enfolding this read was! I recommend it to all including the "eww-ick" homophobes.

STATE OF EMERGENCY, historical novel about Singapore, Malaya, and how Malaysia came to be

STATE OF EMERGENCY
JEREMY TIANG
World Editions (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.99 trade paper

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Siew Li leaves her husband and children in Tiong Bahru to fight for freedom in the jungles of Malaya. Decades later, a Malaysian journalist returns to her homeland to uncover the truth of a massacre committed during the Emergency. And in Singapore, Siew Li's niece Stella finds herself accused of being a Marxist conspirator.

Jeremy Tiang's debut novel dives into the tumultuous days of leftist movements and political detentions in Singapore and Malaysia. It follows an extended family from the 1940s to the present day as they navigate the choppy political currents of the region. What happens when the things that divide us also bind us together?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: What happens when a woman dedicates herself to The Cause (whichever one it might be)? The kind of dedication that requires her to leave family behind, the way men have for millennia? She gets special treatment, in the worst sense of the words "special" when she is caught by the apparatus of state repression. That apparatus crushes communist cadres for the British Empire, then the state that became Malaysia, because heaven knows we can't have people thinking they have rights, deserve consultation on the way they'll be governed, any of that disorderly democratic foolishness! The people don't know (ever, according to their rulers) what is good for them! We'll have to lock 'em up and torture 'em for a while. How long? Who asked you, foreigner, to butt into our business?! Hand over some money so we can torture a few people you don't like, shut up and go away.

Authoritarians all have their eyes on the same hymnal, their hands in the same pot, and their souls AWOL. Doesn't matter the name of their "belief/political system" because they in themselves do not change.

Now that you're all ready for the read...understand that the prose is good but simple (Something heavy was settling onto her, an unpleasant awareness that the world was aslant and she was at the higher end. What could she do?), the characters are good but simple, the world they want to create is good but simple. I learned a good deal about the Emergency, something I wasn't very familiar with compared to the contemporaneous Viet Cong insurgency against the French. Unsurprising from a US reader...and also clear proof British propaganda efforts to keep the monster of American public opinion far away from the fraying Empire's horrific abuses.

There are six loosely linked PoVs in the story. It isn't the smoothest narrative technique but, for this time-hopping story, it works to the advantage of the tale of the Emergency as it develops and resonates through this clan's life. You'll need to be aware of who is addressing you to fully invest in their story, but it is not made difficult for you by Author Tiang. No unusual demands on your concentration are made, no mid-narrative jumps or other such Woolfian stuff; making it into Orlando: A Biography is not his aim.

I found its structure and its voice very easy to immerse myself into, allowing new information to settle into the places I lacked it. I was surprised to learn that women would be aware of what awaited them but still join the rebels. Sexist assumptions are hard to shed, clearly. Very much an ongoing project and welcome to find it reinforced here.

I'm ready for Author Tiang's next book whenever it comes. He has that thing no one can teach: Seeing his story through to its own ends. Nothing forced or misplaced. I'd've bestowed that fifth star had he done a tad bit more to signal how the interconnections really worked, but that isn't a full-star-off offense.

TODAY HONG KONG, TOMORROW THE WORLD: What China's Crackdown Reveals About Its Plans to End Freedom Everywhere

TODAY HONG KONG, TOMORROW THE WORLD: What China's Crackdown Reveals About Its Plans to End Freedom Everywhere
MARK L. CLIFFORD
St. Martin's Press
$29.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A gripping history of China's deteriorating relationship with Hong Kong, and its implications for the rest of the world.

For 150 years as a British colony, Hong Kong was a beacon of prosperity where people, money, and technology flowed freely, and residents enjoyed many civil liberties. In preparation for handing the territory over to China in 1997, Deng Xiaoping promised that it would remain highly autonomous for fifty years. An international treaty established a Special Administrative Region (SAR) with a far freer political system than that of Communist China—one with its own currency and government administration, a common-law legal system, and freedoms of press, speech, and religion.

But as the halfway mark of the SAR’s lifespan approaches in 2022, it is clear that China has not kept its word. Universal suffrage and free elections have not been instituted, harassment and brutality have become normalized, and activists are being jailed en masse. To make matters worse, a national security law that further crimps Hong Kong’s freedoms has recently been decreed in Beijing. This tragic backslide has dire worldwide implications—as China continues to expand its global influence, Hong Kong serves as a chilling preview of how dissenters could be treated in regions that fall under the emerging superpower’s control.

Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World tells the complete story of how a city once famed for protests so peaceful that toddlers joined grandparents in millions-strong rallies became a place where police have fired more than 10,000 rounds of tear gas, rubber bullets and even live ammunition at their neighbors, while pro-government hooligans attack demonstrators in the streets. A Hong Kong resident from 1992 to 2021, author Mark L. Clifford has witnessed this transformation firsthand. As a celebrated publisher and journalist, he has unrivaled access to the full range of the city’s society, from student protestors and political prisoners to aristocrats and senior government officials. A powerful and dramatic mix of history and on-the-ground reporting, this book is the definitive account of one of the most important geopolitical standoffs of our time.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: It is, in light of China's Xi and Russia's Putin inking a deal for "world domination", beyond urgent that we listen to Author Clifford's personal experience on China's until-now slow, patient, and carefully deniable march towards world domination.

After almost thirty years as a foreign resident in Hong Kong, Author Clifford...able, at any time, to leave this city he loves for a solid and certain welcome "home"...was a more than modestly invested resident of what was to be a Special Autonomous Region of China with rights and freedoms guaranteed by treaty in 1984, to take effect in 1997's handover of Hong Kong and be in place until 2047. (I can't help but wonder if the symmetry of that date with the centennial of India and Pakistan's partition and independence was deliberate.) I am sure that his pain, as he's watched the world shrug its shoulders when viewing (at a profitable distance) China's steady, concerted, implacable abrogation of the treaty, is intense. It comes from a genuine love for this unique and vibrant world that is the port on the Pearl River into the South China Sea.

If this year's Beijing Winter Olympics had not focused some attention on the Uyghur Genocide (alleged, in case some troll farm decides I'm good as a target, alleged genocide) and the de-Uyghurization of children in boarding schools, a policy shamelessly, shamefully modeled on US and Canadian Native populations' systematic abuse of the too-recent past, and darn near compelled the regime to require a Uyghur skier to act as torchbearer at the opening ceremonies, no doubt we would all be listening to Author Clifford in a near-comatose indifference.

It is the besetting sin of the capitalist, "democratic" society to look on apathetically when things occur that do not earn or cost them money.

But that said, are we just helpless as the autocratic 2.4 billion-strong Asian/Russian Neues Herrenvolk flex their economic and resource-controlling might? What, then, would be the point of picking up the book? Author Clifford's not Cassandra, nor even Tiresias. He is, though, a keen observer, a skilled craftsman of ideas, and an effective communicator of what he has observed as well as what he has seen work or not work in countering the actions taken by the Chinese authorities. He makes a very plain, inescapable fact crystal clear: China is on a tight time schedule to achieve its goals.

Like the US now, like the Soviet Union in 1989, the population-shrinking bomb's going off in China within the next two decades. The growth, economic and technological, that China has experienced, came at the price of fewer births among Han Chinese (the infamous one-child policy is already scrapped), the real people in China's HIGHLY racist culture. So they need to get their control of Tibet (source of water for over 2 billion people!), of Taiwan (control of the South China Sea, busiest shipping lanes on Earth!), and Xinjiang (mineral wealth beyond belief!) fully consolidated yesterday at the latest.

So it needs maximum Red Army head count. And that's set to decline. Hence the sudden-seeming, multi-pronged, and many-faceted repressions, aggressions, and pacifications we're seeing. Author Clifford, in his wordsmithing, does a more deft and delectable job than I have, but he is not one whit less urgent in his bid for your attention. The world faces a large number of concurrent crises...nothing new there...but one does rather need to step away from the genuine anguish of watching the labor of decades, a century, being dismantled on so many fronts at once. Author Clifford, while his love for Hong Kong doesn't inspire me with similar love, does inspire me to look at the events in Hong Kong and think..."uh oh."

But on an entirely different plane. One of, "wait a minute, that's what the CCP did in Hong Kong!" One of seeing past the mendacious excuses offered for authoritarian groundwork-laying. One of "it can happen here if we let it." There is a level on which reading this book will, and should, cause anyone born in times that called themselves democratic to look long and hard at the political landscape in the US and think "it's not a single second too soon to take decisive action against the home-grown authoritarian movement."

Please.