Abstract. We report on a study of exotic nuclei around doubly magic 132 Sn in terms of the shell model employing a realistic effective interaction derived from the CD-Bonn nucleon-nucleon potential. The short-range repulsion of the latter is renormalized by constructing a smooth lowmomentum potential, V low−k , that is used directly as input for the calculation of the effective interaction. In this paper, we focus attention on proton-neutron multiplets in the odd-odd nuclei 134 Sb, 136 Sb. We show that the behavior of these multiplets is quite similar to that of the analogous multiplets in the counterpart nuclei in the 208 Pb region, 210 Bi and 212 Bi.