"In his brilliant new novel, Perumal Murugan paints a bucolic yet menacing portrait of the rural lives of India's farming community through the story of a helpless young animal lost in a world it naively misunderstands. A farmer in Tamil Nadu is watching the sun set over his village one evening when a mysterious stranger, a giant man, appears on the horizon. He offers the farmer a black goat kid who is the runt of the litter, surely too frail to survive....

Raj and Simran are second generation British Asians who meet one summer riding Eurail with their friends. They fall in love, but Simran's traditional father already has arranged for her to marry the son of an old friend from India.