OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER SUBJECT OF A SIX-PART SUPER SOUL PODCAST SERIES HOSTED BY OPRAH WINFREY
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.
SJ –
This is easily the longest novel I’ve read, but there wasn’t a single moment I felt bored by it. There is so much tragedy in this book (mostly due to the time and locations it takes place in) but there are also such incredible examples of love, support, and family. Definitely recommend.
An old geezer. –
This was a book hard to lay down at bedtime. I wanted to see what happened next. Verghese knows how to weave a complex and beautiful story. Tears came to my eyes several times in the course of reading it. The only downside was too much detailed attention to the medical procedures. Some might enjoy that, but I found it detracted from the story. I stumbled onto this book by accident, but will be reading his other works.
Carlos –
Though some may complain that The Covenant of Water is too long, it had to be long enough to unite the seemingly unconnected characters and events into a complete story. I will not go into the details that other reviewers have already covered. Don’t read them. Just let the author skillfully guide you through this epic tale and the book will not seem long at all. To paraphrase the author…..true fiction is made up of lies that tell the truth about the human condition. The Covenant of Water does this in spades. It should be on the reading list of everyone who will appreciate the difference between fluff, formatted books and novels that will profoundly affect the reader.
artpetals –
This novel is excellent!I am an abstract artist, and much of my paintings are of water. Indeed, water is a main character in this book, and that was hugely interesting to me and deepened my understanding of this element of our lives and of our planet. It is quite long, but I did discover that the author has chapter summaries and lists of the characters on his web site. That was quite helpful, as I quite literally “lost the plot” at one point.I paid extra for the audio version for Kindle. I use the Kindle app on an Android phone. Unfortunately, I had to repeatedly download the audio version because it kept disappearing, so before I would get in the car, I had to re-download it a few times.The very best part of this novel, though, was the author’s narration. The accents were perfect, and I could hear in his voice the affection he has for his characters. He understands them so well that his narration is full of depth and emotion, in a nuanced fashion without monotone or over-emphasis. I attribute this to Abraham’s career as a doctor. Good doctors speak like that to their patients, with a perfect balance of empathy, metaphor, and articulateness. His descriptions of his characters’ body movements are beautiful and poetical and not in the least clinical, and his understanding of the human body makes the book richer. He cares about his characters’ souls and about their bodies.
Kindle Customer –
I was surprised at the last page that I didn’t want this story to end. i wanted at least one other part. but it ended perfectly.so much love and loss. the knowledge there are so many different ways to love and opportunities and you can have deep loves more than once. the author’s words and styles of blending water throughout the book was art in itself. i hope i remember some of the lessons and words and wisdom contained in the story.at first i was shocked after the first part to lean the whole story wouldn’t be about one woman. and it took until about half the book to start seeing the various parts come together. the story must be told over generations.
Curious Reader –
I absolutely loved this book and would recommend reading it. I read this book in conjunction with listening to Oprah’s 6 Episode Podcast with Abraham Verghese and felt I got even more out of the book this way. It is a long read but hang in there. I fell in love with the book from the beginning. The writing is beautiful and you get to know the characters. There are many strong women in the book and my favorites are Big Ammachi and Mariamma. Another recommendation is to go on Dr Verghese’s website and print the list of characters. That was helpful in keeping everyone straight.
Cathryn Conroy –
This is a monumental and original family saga that is like nothing I have ever read. It is richly imaginative and packs an emotional wallop.Taking place in Kerala, a state in South India on the Malabar Coast, it spans nearly 80 years and is brutally realistic. This isn’t a sweetsie-lovey story. It’s about life. Real life. And it hurts the reader sometimes! Children die, loved ones die by suicide, people are killed in somewhat brutal and violent ways, and several suffer debilitating injuries. It’s a tough read because I was emotionally connected with the characters and then wham! They die or suffer. But that is the ultimate premise of this book: Finding the meaning in suffering.Magnificently written by physician and bestselling author Abraham Verghese, this epic multigenerational novel begins in 1900 and ends in 1977, centering on the character of Big Ammachi. She is 12 years old when her father dies, leaving her mother destitute. In a desperate move, this little girl is hurriedly married off to a 40-year-old widower and father of a 2-year-old boy, who lives Kerala, a long day’s journey away. She is nicknamed Big Ammachi (Big Mother) by Jojo, the little boy, and the name sticks as she grows up to become the matriarch of a large family living on the 500-acre estate of Parambil. As she soon discovers, this family has a curse, “the Condition,” as they call it, that takes the life of someone every generation.In addition, there are parallel stories that at first are seemingly unrelated. The most intriguing one is that of Digby Kilgour, a surgeon from Glasgow, Scotland, who joins the Indian Medical Service in Madras. His is also a story of joy and tragedy that eventually—surprisingly and explosively—connects with the family in Parambil, although it is a long and circuitous journey to that end.In addition to a compelling, ever-evolving, and multilayered plot inhabited by bold and vivid characters, this is a profound work of literature that speaks eloquently and poignantly about one family’s place on Earth—how they love, how they argue, how they do good, how they do evil, how they worship God, and how they make the world a better place by just inhabiting it. As you can probably tell from the title, the imagery and symbolism of water and specifically how the covenant of water links all human beings is brilliant.This is also a love letter to medicine—to dedicated physicians, to the scientists who make the medical discoveries, to the hardworking nurses, and especially to all those who give their life to care for the sick.Bonus: Even though it’s told only in words, you’ll get a tour of South India that is so vibrant and so realistic that when I Googled photos of the area, it appeared very much like it did in my imagination. The land is so much a part of the novel that it is almost a character of its own. This is truly a magical place with beautiful beaches, elaborate canals, and picturesque mountains filled with monkeys, elephants, snakes, birds, and tigers.Two pieces of advice to make reading this 700+ page book easier:• There are dozens of characters in this novel, and even the Kindle X-ray feature is not that helpful. Go to the author’s website and download the character list. Print it if you’re reading the paper version of the book. If you’re reading it on Kindle, I advise you to use the “send to Kindle” feature. I had this document right next to the book, so it was easy to search for or find the character. It doesn’t take long before you’ll know who everyone is.• There are quite a few words in the novel in Malayalam, the official language of Kerala. In most cases, it’s easy to figure out the meaning based on the context of the sentence, but I kept my phone nearby so I could Google words I couldn’t decipher.
R. Brunvand –
Abraham Verghese has given voice to what it means to be a physician and to try to define the best path forward in a beautiful, complicated world. It is more about trying to understand the world, pain, joy, illness, health, diversity, and human strengths and frailties than a specific passage in a medical text that makes one a competent physician. While I do not have Dr Verghese’s eloquence, we have shared many professional and personal evolutionary steps, such as caring for patients with HIV in the 1980s. I witnessed of their grace, justified anger, estrangement, and compassion. Each patient and mentor made me a better person and clinician scientist.One of the greatest insights from my colleague, Bopper Deyton and Abraham is that we become better physicians by relating to our patients and collaborating with them on their medical journey. Finding compassionate treatment plans by relating to the similarities we share with our patients rather than building defenses against the abyss by highlighting small differences between people. It is truly, “there but for the grace of god go I”. Knowledge, compassion, and striving all complement one another to make us better people and care givers.This stunning epoch illuminates how we benefit from the collective human experience. Thank you for giving such a nuanced and beautiful account of humanity.Mark Brunvand
Steven E. Sanderson –
This is a great saga, with all of the pluses and minuses of the doorstop novel. It surrounds the lives of rural residents of Kerala, in India’s Southwest, with occasional forays into Tamil Nadu. The protagonists are attractive, smart, good people who suffer the many afflictions we attribute to the deep past: leprosy, typhoid, diptheria, as well as some that are still among us, including neurofibromatosis. Verghese is an accomplished writer and also a physician at Stanford. So, get ready for a lot of diagnostic stuff, as well as surgical procedures that will interest some more than others. Except for the occasional lecher and selfish relatives, no villains haunt the story. At times, the prose is pretty didactic, but I don’t know how one gets around it when speaking of Hindu divinities, informal names, caste categories and other contextual challenges. I thought the romances were a little too good to be true, and despite the title, water is more allegorical than real, considering how powerful the monsoon and the watersheds of the Western Ghats are to the region. And the novel barely glances at the structuring forces of WWI and WWII, the partition that followed independence in 1947, and the stresses of Indian modernization of rural life. In a sense, the book hovers just underneath all these great tectonic changes, staying at the level of village, plantation, and individual actors. Not a complaint, really, as I can’t feature including the macro without adding another 700 pages or so, but still….Having spent time in Southern India, I enjoyed the sights and sounds and manners that I remember. I especially recognized the uniqueness of train travel: stepping off into the station in Madras (or Delhi) or careening across trestles, or sharing compartments with the most memorable companions. I always enjoy reading Verghese’s fiction. Such a talent deserves praise.
Greg Barlin –
Phew. I made it. Finished. Complete. Fin.At 776 pages, The Covenant of Water is a commitment. It’s long, it’s dense, it’s heartbreaking more often than it’s not, and with every new character introduced, I found myself wondering where it was going and how it might end. But it’s also beautifully rendered, meticulously researched, and a tour de force. Given that, I have no idea how I should rate it against everything else I’ve read this year.The novel spans almost 80 years and takes place primarily in southern India. The story opens in 1900 with the arranged wedding of a 12-year-old girl to a much older man. Following their strained and awkward nuptials, he brings her to his home called Parambil, around which a community has developed. As she begins to learn how to be a wife to her husband, and the awkwardness between them begins to thaw as she grows older, she also comes to learn of her husband’s genealogy, and the repeated tragedy that afflicted many of his ancestors. The girl — who by now has become a young woman and is known as “Big Ammachi” — comes to refer to it as The Condition, whereby an unnatural number of ancestors in her husband’s lineage have had an aversion to water and several have died in what would typically be avoidable circumstances involving water.While The Condition crops up as a through line over the course the novel, the book is less about that mysterious affliction than it is a multi-generational character study of a family and the people who move in their circles. The novel flows like a river, with detailed scenes and character development intertwining. The reader, meanwhile, is left to be carried along like an oarless boat upon that river. I will admit that I got frustrated at times with the book. Even by the halfway point, it felt like plenty of story had been told and it was time to wrap things up, yet nearly 400 additional pages still awaited me. What more needs to be told? How will this end? When will it end?There is a passage in the book in which Verghese writes the following:”And now (she) is here, standing in the water that connects them all in time and space and always has. The water she first stepped in minutes ago is long gone and yet it is here, past and present and future inexorably coupled, like time made incarnate. This is the covenant of water: that they’re all linked by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone.”Shame on me for doubting Verghese or his intentions, and for presuming these seemingly disconnected pieces wouldn’t eventually find one another to complete the puzzle. While I was being carried along the river, Verghese was weaving a complex tapestry around me. Every character and story in the meandering novel has a purpose, and all of that intention is pulled together and made clear In the final 150 (or so) pages. Verghese honors the passage above, and like the water he references, he beautifully ties together the strands of his story.It’s been more than a decade since I read Cutting For Stone, and I remember it fondly although the details are admittedly hazy. Acknowledging the hazy memory could be off a bit, I still feel that The Covenant of Water represents Verghese taking his skills to another level. There is plenty of medicine in the book, like in Cutting For Stone, but more broadly than in that work, with Verghese tackling several diseases that have since been mostly eradicated (with leprosy leading the way). Verghese also uses almost 80 years of Indian history and the birth of the nation as a backdrop, starting with the British occupation and class (and caste) systems that evolved around that, through Indian independence and the battle between socialism and a more market-driven economy that followed. The role of women in Indian society is a consistently and critically examined theme. As such, in many ways The Covenant of Water is an ode to the strength and contributions of women, particularly in a more male-dominated society and culture.So how do I rate this beast of a work, which was undeniably brilliant and complex but also struggled to retain my interest at times? For starters, it is the book for which I have the most respect among those I’ve read this year. I didn’t enjoy it the most, and I wouldn’t universally recommend it (as I said at the top, it’s a commitment). But when I consider the amount of time, and research, and intricate plotting, and effort that went into this, and then compare that to some of the more enjoyable (but less expansive) books among this year’s favorites, I have to acknowledge the author’s accomplishment. While I didn’t love every moment reading the book, and I found myself breaking it up and reading other things in between, I did really enjoy it if I look back on it in its entirety. If it had fizzled to a conclusion, that wouldn’t be the case, but I think the final two sections of the book pull everything together in a wonderful way that made me appreciate the purposeful intention of all that came before.For those of us that read regularly, I’m sure we’ve all thought to ourselves at some point, “I bet I could write a pretty good novel.” I have certainly read books, good books, and come away still believing (or even being inspired) that I might be able to create something comparable. The Covenant of Water is in a different league, and for anyone harboring aspirations of authorship, it will humble you and remind you that there are many levels to writing, and there are certain levels that are simply unobtainable for all but a few. It’s the type of book that illustrates an author operating at the apex of his craft, where all of his skills around writing, planning, dialogue, structure, and research come together to create something beautiful. Go in with eyes wide open — this will probably dominate your nightstand for several weeks — but trust that the payoff at the end is worth the journey to get there.