"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 watchingthe 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....

One family accepts an invitation to the rural home of another they met on vacation, only to find their lives altered in unexpected, deeply horrifying ways.

Deep in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, isolated from society, a devoted father dedicates his life to transforming his six young children into extraordinary adults. But when a tragedy strikes the family, they are forced to leave this self-created paradise and begin a journey into the outside world that challenges his idea of what it means to be a parent and brings into question everything he's taught them. "Finely wrought and inventive, Captain...