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
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
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
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
Evocative ... the fast pace will keep readers hooked.
Publishers Weekly
Lakghomi has included so many layers in South, the effect is hallucinatory, a sublime trip, one full of terror and wonder.
Exacting Clam
A Lynchian descent into the paranoia and alienation of totalitarianism, South is a haunting and dreamlike novel.
Shelf Awareness
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
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
South is an exceptional example of how the personal and political, when intimately entwined, make for a deeply compelling, even necessary read.
Full Stop
Thrilling and disquieting, South is a disorienting, cerebral novel that meditates on state surveillance.
Foreword