Worried about their son's healthy eating habits, Gregory's parents take him to the doctor to teach him how to eat old shoes and boxes like the rest of the goats, but things do not go as planned.

"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 watching the 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....

When his goat assistant is arrested for stealing the golden pickle paperweight, a mystery-solving Venus flytrap is determined to find the real thief.

Three clever billy goats outwit a mean, ugly troll that lives under the bridge they must cross on their way to a grassy pasture.