The Fertile Earth: A Novel

"[A] heart-wrenching tale of forbidden love" —THE WASHINGTON POST

In a rural Indian village, two families live on opposite sides of the class divide. On one side are the landowning aristocrats; on the other are the landless indentured.

But Vijaya, Sree, Krishna, and Ranga—the children of these families—are carrying on a secret friendship. One summer, when a man-eating tiger attacks the village, the four make an ill-advised plan to go into the jungle to capture it. The hunt, and its catastrophic end, entwines their fates, and the repercussions play out over the next decade as they come of age, with violent conflict erupting between the classes.

Shortlisted for the 2024 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, Ruthvika Rao’s The Fertile Earth is a novel in which the private rites of friendship, kinship, and great love collide with a political revolution and the forces of beauty and power are intertwined into “a masterpiece” (Booklist, starred review).