The Covenant of Water

Across three-quarters of a century, from 1900 to 1977, the physician-novelist follows a matriarch known as Big Ammachi and her descendants through marriage, medicine, caste and faith, braiding intimate domestic life with the sweep of a changing India.

Verghese writes with a doctor's precision about bodies and ailments and a storyteller's appetite for incident; the novel is long, unhurried and generously populated, the kind of immersive family epic readers live inside for weeks. Some may find its coincidences and abundance old-fashioned; many more will surrender happily to its warmth and momentum. Beneath the saga runs a tender inquiry into suffering, healing and the ties that outlast death.