As he embarks on a quartet of novels following one family, the Malaysian author talks about storytelling, family silences – and the legacy of colonialism

Twenty years into his life as a published novelist, Tash Aw is considering the creative freedom that comes with surrendering control: of allowing himself to write without fully understanding how a novel will eventually take shape, what its characters’ trajectories will look like, what they’re thinking and feeling. We are talking about The South, the first in a planned quartet of novels exploring the lives of the Lim family; Aw is halfway through writing the second instalment, which, he tells me, is “not going to plan, but going well”.

Ambiguity and suggestiveness have been present in his previous four novels – 2005’s The Harmony Silk Factory, which won the Whitbread prize for a debut novel and was longlisted for the Booker; Map of the Invisible World (2009); Five Star Billionaire (2013); and 2019’s We, the Survivors – but now his impatience with fiction that declares itself too certain of its material, of the realities and contours of the lives it depicts, seems palpable.