The Covenant of Water (Oprah's Book Club)
Abraham Verghese
(Author)
Description
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.
Product Details
| Publisher | Grove Press |
| Publish Date | May 02, 2023 |
| Pages | 736 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Hardback |
| EAN/UPC | 9780802162175 |
| Dimensions | 9.1 X 6.4 X 2.3 inches | 2.0 pounds |
About the Author
ABRAHAM VERGHESE is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the author of the NBCC Award finalist My Own Country and the New York Times Notable Book The Tennis Partner. His most recent book, Cutting for Stone, spent 107 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold more than two million copies worldwide. It was translated into more than twenty languages and is being adapted for film by Anonymous Content. Verghese was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama, has received six honorary degrees, and is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He lives and practices medicine in Stanford, California where he is the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor in the Stanford University School of Medicine. A decade in the making, The Covenant of Water is his first book since Cutting for Stone.
Reviews
Praise for The Covenant of Water:
*OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK*
Winner of the Golden Poppy Award for Fiction
Longlisted for the New American Voices Award
An Instant New York Times Bestseller
Named One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of the Year
Named the #7 Best Book of the Year by Amazon
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
Named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times, TIME, NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, Kirkus Reviews, BookPage, Library Journal, Apple, Minnesota Public Radio, Washington Independent Review of Books, and Chicago Public Library
Named a Most Anticipated Book by the Washington Post, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Oprah Daily, Publishers Weekly (Top 10), Literary Hub, and BookPage
"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
"A rich, heartfelt novel . . . A lavish smorgasbord of genealogy, medicine and love affairs, tracing a family's evolution from 1900 through the 1970s, in pointillist detail . . . What binds and drives this vast, intricate history as it patiently unspools are vibrant characters, sensuous detail and an intimate tour of cultures, landscapes and mores across eras . . . Verghese's technical strengths are consistent and versatile: crisp, taut pacing, sensuous descriptions that can fan out into rhapsody . . . Verghese's compassion for his ensemble, which subtly multiplies, infuses every page. So does his ability to inhabit a carousel of sensibilities--including those of myriad women--with penetrating insight and empathy . . . Rich and reverberant. The further into the novel readers sink, the more power it accrues . . . Grandly ambitious, impassioned . . . A magnificent feat."--Joan Frank, Washington Post
"Grand, spectacular, sweeping and utterly absorbing . . . It is a better world for having a book in it that chronicles so many tragedies in a tone that never deviates from hope."--Andrew Solomon, New York Times Book Review (cover review)
"An immense, immersive work, brimming with interconnected storylines that meander and converge like great river tributaries . . . The novel encompasses intense passion and tragedy, as well as a medical mystery . . . An essential, even healing feat of imagination, a whole world to get lost in."--Anderson Tepper, Los Angeles Times
"Much will be written about Abraham Verghese's multigenerational South Indian novel in the coming months and years. As we've seen with Verghese's earlier fiction, there will be frequent references to that other celebrated doctor-writer, Anton Chekhov. There will also be continued invocations of the likes of Charles Dickens and George Eliot to describe Verghese's ambitious literary scope and realism. Indeed, the literary feats in The Covenant of Water deserve to be lauded as much as those of such canonical authors . . . Ever the skillful surgeon, Verghese threads meaningful connections between macrocosmic and microcosmic details so elegantly that they are often barely noticeable at first."--Jenny Bhatt, NPR
"Riveting . . . This is a novel--a splendid, enthralling one--about the body, about what characters inherit and what makes itself felt upon them. It is the body that contains ambiguities and mysteries. As in his international bestseller Cutting for Stone, Verghese's medical knowledge and his mesmerising attention to
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