OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK - From the New York Times-bestselling
author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and magisterial epic of
love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala, South India, following three
generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret
"One of the best books I've read in my entire life. It's epic. It's
transportive . . . It was unputdownable!"--Oprah Winfrey,
OprahDaily.com
The Covenant of Water is the long-awaited new novel by Abraham
Verghese, the author of the major word-of-mouth bestseller Cutting for
Stone, which has sold over 1.5 million copies in the United States
alone and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for over two
years.
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.
At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala's
long-existing Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is
sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old
husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the
young girl--and future matriarch, known as Big Ammachi--will witness
unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy
and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only
constants.
A shimmering evocation of a bygone 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 difficulties
undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. It is
one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.
