South - by Babak Lakghomi (Paperback)

About the Book

A journalist travels to the South on a mysterious mission to report on recent strikes in an offshore oil rig. Defending himself against unknown enemies, he spirals into a hallucinatory and haunting landscape. A mystical novel about totalitarianism, surveillance, alienation, and guilt that questions the nature of truth and forces that control us.

Book Synopsis

A journalist travels to the South on a mysterious mission to report on recent strikes in an offshore oil rig. Defending himself against unknown enemies, he spirals into a hallucinatory and haunting landscape. A mystical novel about totalitarianism, surveillance, alienation, and guilt that questions the nature of truth and forces that control us.

Review Quotes

South is a muted industrial thriller with mystic bits splashed throughout. Babak Lakghomi has taken the quick, minimal aspects of his early novella and extended them into another enigmatic, unnerving hypothetical.

South is an exceptional example of how the personal and political, when intimately entwined, make for a deeply compelling, even necessary read.

A quiet meditation on imagination and reality, absence and presence, and the world around us. Lakghomi achieves a poetic and hypnotic effect with his tightly constructed, spare prose.

A Lynchian descent into the paranoia and alienation of totalitarianism, South is a haunting and dreamlike novel.

As alluring as it is disquieting, with the strange and haunting visuals of an Andrei Tarkovsky film and the enigmatic feel of a novel by Italo Calvino.

Babak Lakghomi is a visionary artist and masterful guide into and beyond the labyrinth containing all the unnameable and undefinable problems of our universe, our world, our little lives, waking and dreaming. South is another brilliant novel from an author who astounds me.

Disguised as a high concept page-turner akin to Enrique Vila-Matas and Paul Auster, Babak Lakghomi's slyly subversive and uncanny novel, South, is pure sublime. Packed full of complex silence, sex, deceit, erasure, captivity, dreamlife, memory, and yes, despair, it wastes no syllable while wading neck-deep into its own conspiracy, remembering just in time to come back up for air where others drown.

Evocative ... the fast pace will keep readers hooked.

His portrait of a totalitarian nation-state, where the truth is fungible and selfhood is a luxury, is as surreal as it is nightmarish.

Lakghomi has included so many layers in South, the effect is hallucinatory, a sublime trip, one full of terror and wonder.

Thrilling and disquieting, South is a disorienting, cerebral novel that meditates on state surveillance.

With South, Lakghomi proves himself to be a master of the minimal. South uses sparseness to elevate and intensify suspense. It manages the mysterious and paranoid in such a way that what results is a literary page-turner, even when you want to linger and savour the language.

With a narrative style that is tight, almost skeletal in nature, South moves at a steady pace, growing increasingly distorted and claustrophobic ... every word counts.

South is a muted industrial thriller with mystic bits splashed throughout. Babak Lakghomi has taken the quick, minimal aspects of his early novella and extended them into another enigmatic, unnerving hypothetical.-- "Heavy Feather Review"

South is an exceptional example of how the personal and political, when intimately entwined, make for a deeply compelling, even necessary read.-- "Full Stop"

A quiet meditation on imagination and reality, absence and presence, and the world around us. Lakghomi achieves a poetic and hypnotic effect with his tightly constructed, spare prose.-- "Brandon Hobson, author of The Removed"

A Lynchian descent into the paranoia and alienation of totalitarianism, South is a haunting and dreamlike novel.-- "Shelf Awareness"

As alluring as it is disquieting, with the strange and haunting visuals of an Andrei Tarkovsky film and the enigmatic feel of a novel by Italo Calvino.-- "Amina Cain, author of A Horse at Night"

Babak Lakghomi is a visionary artist and masterful guide into and beyond the labyrinth containing all the unnameable and undefinable problems of our universe, our world, our little lives, waking and dreaming. South is another brilliant novel from an author who astounds me.-- "Bud Smith, author of Teenager"

Disguised as a high concept page-turner akin to Enrique Vila-Matas and Paul Auster, Babak Lakghomi's slyly subversive and uncanny novel, South, is pure sublime. Packed full of complex silence, sex, deceit, erasure, captivity, dreamlife, memory, and yes, despair, it wastes no syllable while wading neck-deep into its own conspiracy, remembering just in time to come back up for air where others drown.-- "Blake Butler, author of Aannex"

Evocative ... the fast pace will keep readers hooked.-- "Publishers Weekly"

His portrait of a totalitarian nation-state, where the truth is fungible and selfhood is a luxury, is as surreal as it is nightmarish.-- "Locus Magazine"

Lakghomi has included so many layers in South, the effect is hallucinatory, a sublime trip, one full of terror and wonder.-- "Exacting Clam"

Thrilling and disquieting, South is a disorienting, cerebral novel that meditates on state surveillance.-- "Foreword"

With South, Lakghomi proves himself to be a master of the minimal. South uses sparseness to elevate and intensify suspense. It manages the mysterious and paranoid in such a way that what results is a literary page-turner, even when you want to linger and savour the language.-- "Southwest Review"

With a narrative style that is tight, almost skeletal in nature, South moves at a steady pace, growing increasingly distorted and claustrophobic ... every word counts.-- "Roughghosts"

About the Author

Babak Lakghomi is the author of Floating Notes. His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, NOON, Ninth Letter, New York Tyrant, and Green Mountains Review, and has been translated into Italian and Farsi. Babak was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives and writes in Toronto.