The Fertile Earth

The Fertile Earth by Ruthvika Rao is a thrilling story of love and resistance about two young people born across social lines, set against a tumultuous political landscape in India.

The mounting curiosity amongst them was not about the identity of the victims; they all knew who the dead ones were, nor about the identity of the perpetrators; they all knew whose work it was.

The only question that remained, therefore, was who amongst them had seen it happen.

1969: In a remote field in Irumi, a tiny village nestled deep within the ghats and jungles of Telangana, a small boy witnesses a shocking act of vengeance.

A decade earlier, Vijaya and Sree, daughters of the landowning Deshmukh family, set out with Krishna and Ranga, the sons of one of their parents’ servants, determined to track down a tiger rumoured to be circling Irumi. The consequences of this terrible day will explode through each of their young lives, sending them scattering for different corners of India.

When Krishna and Vijaya find one another again, they are as changed as the country they call home. Both are pulled inexorably back to the place that shaped them, a place that is no longer safe…