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Malaysian novelist Tash Aw is the author of The Harmony Silk Factory and Five Star Billionaire , both long-listed for the Booker Prize. His new book, The South , begins a quartet of novels and portrays a summerlong romance between two teenage Malaysian boys.

'Giovanni's Room' by James Baldwin (1956)

I first read this when I was at university and return to it regularly. It's the story of young people falling in love and trying to carve out a space for themselves in a foreign city—which sounds simple enough. But there's so much packed into such a slim volume: discrimination, exclusion, desire, the denial of the self. It's the ultimate Paris

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