Two boys on the brink of adulthood in 1990s Malaysia, in the opening volume of a Proustian quartet

Picture a farm that has been in a family for generations and can no longer be made to pay; there’s an orchard of beloved trees that may have to be chopped down. It’s a hot, dry summer and two estranged brothers decline into middle age while their adolescent children wait desperately for their lives to begin. This is a world we’d expect to find in a play by Chekhov, rather than a novel by Tash Aw, who has made his name with exuberant, heavily plotted portraits of life in Malaysia and China, the characters edging between makeshift grifting and actual criminality. But now he has distilled his vision of the novel into something smaller and more intense. The South takes place on a single farm in rural south Malaysia over a single summer in the 1990s, and shows Aw breaking into newly empathetic and impactful territory with his already considerable novelistic panache and artfulness.

The book soaks us in bodily intimacy from the outset, opening with a description of two boys having sex for the first time in the orchard. Jay, who has longed for this for weeks, wants to draw out the moment, so that “whatever time they have together will feel like many hours, a whole day”, while Chuan seems to want “to accelerate each second and collapse time”. Aw is brilliant at compressing sociological insight into intimate scenes, and here the boys’ differences of wealth and education emerge implicitly. Jay’s father Jack was the legitimate son of their grandfather, who bought the farm as a young man. Jack is a relatively wealthy intellectual, a professor of mathematics in urban Malaysia, albeit a frustrated and disappointed man who has just lost his job. Chuan’s father Fong is their grandfather’s illegitimate son and has spent his life managing this farm he doesn’t own, leaving Chuan to grow up feral and barely schooled. Now the two families have come together for a summer after the grandfather has died and left the farm, quixotically, to Jay’s mother Sui, a once bright and ambitious woman subdued by marriage to Jack.