Seasons of the Palm
PERUMAL MURUGAN, TRANSLATED FROM TAMIL BY V. GEETHA
Shorty, a young untouchable farmhand, is in bondage to a paternal yet powerful landlord. He spends his days herding sheep and tilling the fields, caught between the rigours of an unforgiving life and the solace he finds in nature and the company of his friends. He struggles to keep a fragile happiness, but endless work and a stubborn hunger gnaw away at his spirited innocence. And before long, Shorty must confront the unyielding reality of his situation.
Poignant and powerful, Seasons of the Palm is merciless in its portrayal of the daily humiliations of untouchability, but is also lyrical in its evocation of the grace with which the oppressed come to terms with their dark fate.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PERUMAL MURUGAN is the star of contemporary Tamil literature. An award-winning writer, poet and scholar, he has garnered both critical acclaim and commercial success for his vast array of work. His novels have been translated into English to immense acclaim, including Current Show, Pyre, Seasons of the Palm, which was shortlisted for the Kiriyama Prize in 2005, and One Part Woman, his best-known work, which was shortlisted for the Crossword Award, longlisted for the inaugural National Book Award for Translation and won the prestigious ILF Samanvay Bhasha Samman. A Lonely Harvest and Trial by Silence — his two ingenious parallel sequels to One Part Woman — were shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Fiction 2019. A Lonely Harvest was also longlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2019. Songs of a Coward is a collection of his poetry written in exile. His debut novel was published in English as Rising Heat in 2020, nearly three decades after it was first published in Tamil.
V. GEETHA is a writer, translator, and feminist historian who writes in English and Tamil on gender, caste labour, and education. Her major publications include Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India (2021), Undoing Impunity: Speech after Sexual Violence, Gender, Patriarchy (2016), and Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: From Iyothee Thass to Periyar (1998; coauthored with S. V. Rajadurai). She has also translated, from Tamil to English, two novels by author Perumal Murugan and trans activist A. Revathi’s autobiography, The Truth about Me: A Hijra Life. Currently, she is the editorial director of Tara Books in Chennai.
PRAISE
“A powerful novel ... [Murugan] recounts the everyday brutality of caste society in relentless detail”
— The Hindu
“[Murugan’s] characters, dialogues and locales are unerringly drawn and intensely evocative ... A superb writer”
— Indian Express
“The most accomplished of his generation of Tamil writers”
— Caravan
INFORMATION
Published by Penguin, 2017
ISBN 9780143428367
320 pages, paperback