Rising Heat

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.

Young Selvan's life is no longer the same. His family's ancestral land has been sold in order to make way for the construction of a housing colony. Now the verdant landscape of his childhood has been denuded, while Selvan and his family are compelled to move to much smaller lodgings. In the ensuing years, as the pressures of their situation simmer to a boil, Selvan observes his family undergo dramatic shifts in their fortunes as greed and jealousy threaten to overshadow their lives.
Murugan's first novel, which launched a splendid literary career, is a tour de force. Now translated for the first time, it poses powerful questions about the human cost of relentless urbanization in the name of progress.

Rising Heat is a work of understated beauty, an elegy to the past, yet hauntingly resonant with our turbulent times.Through this novel, Murugan makes the readers question the human cost and true value of never-ending development in the name of progress and urbanization.In Rising Heat one can spot traces of the author's unflinchingly honest and poignant narrative.Published in 1991, the novel casts an artist's eye on the price that rural communities have to pay for the urbanisation of their land.