The Covenant of Water
Isabella’s Review:
The book some of us have been waiting for for years!
Abraham Verghese wrote one of my all time favorite books, Cutting for Stone, in 2009 (also known as the year Books & Company came into being ☺️) and I have been waiting ever since to see what was next.
And here it is! This time Verghese takes us to India where we follow a family in Kerala from 1900-1970 and in each generation at least one member dies by drowning.
Similar (but I’m sure quite different from the previous book) this is also the story of love, faith and medicine. Cannot wait!
A stunning and magisterial new epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala and following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret.
Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. The family is part of a Christian community that traces itself to the time of the apostles, but times are shifting, and the matriarch of this family, known as Big Ammachi—literally “Big Mother”—will witness unthinkable changes at home and at large over the span of her extraordinary life. All of Verghese’s great gifts are on display in this new work: there are astonishing scenes of medical ingenuity, fantastic moments of humor, a surprising and deeply moving story, and characters imbued with the essence of life.
A shimmering evocation of a lost India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. It is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.
