The Covenant of Water

Genre

Literary Fiction

Publisher

Grove Press (Grove Atlantic)

Publication year

2023

ISBN

9780802162175

The Covenant of Water spans the years 1900 to 1977 in Kerala, on India's Malabar Coast, following three generations of a family afflicted by a strange pattern: in each generation, one member drowns. Abraham Verghese, a physician, weaves medicine, faith and social change through the family's...

Water is everywhere in Abraham Verghese's vast Kerala saga - in the backwaters and monsoons of India's Malabar Coast, and in a family affliction by which, in each generation, one member drowns. 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. Ambitious and deeply humane, it is a book to disappear into - a reminder of how much a traditional novel, expertly told, can still hold.