South - Babak Lakghomi

South is a hallucinatory reimagination of life in a world under totalitarianism, and an individual’s quest for truth, agency, and understanding.“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 AWARENESSB, a journalist, travels to the South of an unnamed desert country for a mysterious mission to write a report about the recent strikes on an offshore oil rig. From the beginning of his trip, he is faced with a cruel and broken landscape of drought and decay, superstitious believers of evil winds and spirits, and corrupt entities focused on manipulation and censorship. As he tries to defend himself against his unknown enemies, we learn about his father’s disappearance, his fading love with his wife, and his encounter with an unknown woman. A puzzle-like novel about totalitarianism, surveillance, alienation, and guilt that questions the forces that control us.A RARE MACHINES BOOK