Pyre

From the author of One Part Woman and The Story of a Goat, both longlisted for the National Book Award for Translation, comes a poignant and startling novel about love, caste, and intolerance

Profiled in both the New Yorker and the New York Times, Perumal Murugan is one of India’s highest selling and most respected literary writers, and Pyre is perhaps his most beloved work. Saroja and Kumaresan are young and in love. After meeting in a small southern Indian town where Kumaresan works at a soda bottling shop, they quickly marry before returning to Kumaresan’s family village, where they hope to build a happy life together. But they are harboring a terrible secret: Saroja is from a different caste than Kumaresan, and if the villagers find out, they will both be in grave danger. Faced with venom from her mother-in-law and questions from her new neighbors, Saroja tries to adjust to a new lonely and uncomfortable life, while Kumaresan struggles to scrape together enough money for them to start over somewhere new. Will their love keep them safe in a world filled with thorns? In evocative prose, Perumal Murugan masterfully conjures a moving tale of innocent young love pitted against chilling violence.

Perumal Murugan is one of India’s most well-known literary writers. He has written eleven novels and five collections each of short stories and poetry. His novels One Part Woman and The Story of a Goat were both longlisted for the National Book Award for Translation, and One Part Woman also won the prestigious ILF Samanvay Bhasha Samman for writing in Indian languages and the Translation Prize from India’s National Academy of Letters.

Aniruddhan Vasudevan writes and translates between Tamil and English. He is currently a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Princeton Society of Fellows and Lecturer in Anthropology and the Humanities Council (2020-2023), Princeton University.