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Inside the Best-Seller List

Abraham Verghese’s 724-Page Novel Is a Family Affair

The physician-author’s new book, “The Covenant of Water,” contains traces of his mother, his cousin and his own medical experience.

By Elisabeth Egan

The New York Times’s review of Abraham Verghese’s debut novel, “ Cutting for Stone ,” wasn’t negative, per se, but it contained hints of lukewarmness that might have taken some of the air out of its 2009 publication. “Stalwart” and “puzzling” are not the stuff of quotes publishers like to print on paperbacks, nor is damnation by faint praise — for instance, “He is to be admired for his ambition.”

But Verghese doesn’t seem to hold any grudges. In a phone interview, he described how he knew the paperback had taken flight. “I remember pulling up to do a reading at a bookstore close to where I live and I couldn’t find parking,” Verghese said. “I walked into the store and realized this place which I had gone to often was packed! And they were there to hear me.” Between 2010 and 2013, “Cutting for Stone” spent a whopping 117 weeks on the paperback fiction list.

Verghese’s second novel, “The Covenant of Water,” has already followed a different trajectory: With a nudge from Oprah Winfrey, it shot straight to the top of the hardcover fiction list in its first week. The 724-page, 10-part, 84-chapter book follows three generations of a family in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast ; in a mostly positive review in The Times, Andrew Solomon described it as “ grand, spectacular, sweeping and utterly absorbing .” If you’re a person who appreciates the physical object of a book, this one is worth cradling, flipping through and inhaling in the olfactory sense. As Verghese said, “It looks like it should be as heavy as a Bible, but I think that the publisher was able to pull off a feat with the quality of the paper, which is beautiful but also very light. It’s like picking up a fake dumbbell. It comes right up in your hand.”

“The Covenant of Water” was inspired by a 157-page illustrated document Verghese’s mother, Mariam Verghese, created for her 5-year-old granddaughter and namesake, who wanted to know what life was like when her grandmother was growing up. The novel contains a series of small drawings by Thomas Varghese, who is Abraham Verghese’s cousin (his name is spelled differently). The pair grew up together in Ethiopia. “I asked him to recreate Mum’s drawings,” Verghese said. “He could have done things that were very sophisticated but deliberately wanted to get the sense of a pencil sketch done by a talented hand working fairly quickly.”

Will we have to wait another 14 years for Verghese’s next book? Time will tell. So will the state of public health . As an infectious disease expert and a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine , Verghese was (understandably) distracted by the pandemic. “It was poignant for me to see the parallels between diseases I was writing about — smallpox, other fatal illnesses — and what was happening in our wards,” he said. “What was unchanged since antiquity, it seems to me, is who we become when we’re very ill. We become so dependent on others and we lean on the same things. We lean on family, we lean on familiar rituals, we lean on faith , if we have it. We lean heavily on the medical profession.”

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, the covenant of water.

THE COVENANT OF WATER, Abraham Verghese’s long-awaited new novel, comprises 10 Parts, 84 chapters, 715 pages, perfect bits of poetry from Raymond Carver and e. e. cummings, and the reminder from Herodotus to “[c]ount no man happy until the end is known.” Among many other things, the story encompasses two continents and three generations of a Malayalis family. The individuals are diverse, troubled and blessed, and each has some connection to The Condition. The puzzle of The Condition, along with the subsequent putting together and taking apart, serves as the thread stitching the book together.

Part One begins in 1900, along the princely states of Cochin and Travancore of South India, with the lengthy journey of 12-year-old Mariamma to meet and marry a handsome widower. Her mother travels with her, but she is an impoverished widow and will return home with few prospects of ever seeing Mariamma again. The groom arrives at last and stands by the girl. When he lifts her veil, he abruptly declares that she is but a child and stomps away. His older sister, Thankamma, chases after him and says it would be best to take the girl into his household until she is ready to be his wife.

"[A]llow yourself to become immersed in the laughter and tears, and discover the unclaimed secrets of this epic, wonderful novel."

He returns to the marriage broker and the ceremony, fastening a thin gold chain around her neck, and they set off for his estate, Parambil. She is introduced to the privileges of being a wealthy landowner’s wife, and she will become Big Ammachi, the matriarch and steadying hand for many years for her family and the people who live at Parambil.

Moving ahead to 1933, Part Two introduces a Scotsman, Digby Kilgour, who leaves Glasgow for Madras as an Assistant Civil Surgeon. He is immediately uncomfortable as he disembarks the ship into the teeming shay of native Indians because he is now identified as an “occupier” and will be moved to the head of any line, given preferential treatment, and served the best food. Only the color of his skin marks him as better than them, and he feels the resentment. There is small comfort knowing that his plan is to make changes. His story will link in surprising ways to Big Ammachi’s family.

In Part Five, 1944, there is sweetness and joy at the betrothal party of Elsie and Philipose, Big Ammachi’s son. Neither the prospective bride nor the groom shows any signs of the shyness usually associated with arranged marriages. They compare their feet and their skin touches. They speak in English so their conversation remains private. They ignore the ammachis who are seated across the room on low cushions. Gathered to supervise, they become apoplectic over these acts of intimacy. They would have blown whistles had they been in possession of them.

Elsie is an extraordinary artist, and Philipose writes newspaper columns about his world, which he calls “Unfictions” and signs An Ordinary Man . As he realizes that Elsie is interested in him, as he is in her, Philipose questions why she has chosen him. She quotes a lede from one of his newspaper columns: “Secrets tend to be hidden in the most obvious places.” He is flattered, and they are wed.

Throughout THE COVENANT OF WATER, central characters take over chapters of their own, showing their everyday lives --- eating fish, splaying rich fleshy mangoes, and sprinkling them with red chili pepper and salt, setting mouths on fire. Big Ammachi talks with God in conversations both polite and demanding. “Lord,” she prays, “I won’t mention specifics. After all, what do you know about my life on earth?” She wants God to know that she was the right wife for her husband and asks where he has been, not watching out for her family as he should.

There is lushness in the south Indian landscape, the swirling waters of 142 rivers, the monsoons that destroy and flood for weeks at a time: “The Madras evening breeze has a body to it, its atomic constituents knitted together to create a thing of substance...” The breeze carries the scents of orchids and salts, and an educated Madrasi will say, “Yes, yes, you are having your Taj Mahal, your Golden Temple, your Eiffel Tower...but can anything match our Madras evening breeze?” No. The Madras evening breeze doesn’t judge caste or privilege, leper or healer, believer or skeptic, landowner or pavement dweller. The breeze seems both part of and representative of the moving feast of sweat, chills, war and peace, famine and plenty.

How do you read this book? After all, it’s a novel so rich, so heavy with wisdom, authentic and fabricated history, and family stories snaking back through the years and heavy wet vines and red soil, between the stocky legs of Damodaran, the elephant who stands guard at Parambil. I became a teacher again. I printed a map of India. I marked pronunciations for cities, foods and names. I jotted down brief summaries of the Parts. I dog-eared the pages with exceptional passages until there were more dog-ears than flats. I read sections aloud to my husband about an extraordinary medical procedure that saved Digby’s hand.

For you? Read THE COVENANT OF WATER as you will. Just allow yourself to become immersed in the laughter and tears, and discover the unclaimed secrets of this epic, wonderful novel.

Reviewed by Jane T. Krebs on May 26, 2023

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

• Publication Date: May 2, 2023
• Genres: Fiction , Historical Fiction
• Hardcover: 736 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press
• ISBN-10: 0802162177
• ISBN-13: 9780802162175

Review: 'The Covenant of Water,' by Abraham Verghese

FICTION: In this intimate, epic novel, three generations in a South Indian family live under a watery curse.

By Ellen Akins

When you come to the end of Abraham Verghese's new novel, "The Covenant of Water," you will feel that you have lived among the Indian and Anglo-Indian characters who populate its pages for almost a century. It's that long. But it's also that immersive — appropriately enough for a book so steeped in the medium and metaphor of water, as the title suggests.

We begin in 1900 with a 12-year-old bride in Travancore, then a princely state "at the southern tip of India, sandwiched between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats ... a child's fantasy world of rivulets and canals, a latticework of lakes and lagoons, a maze of backwaters and bottle-green lotus ponds; a vast circulatory system because, as [the bride's] father used to say, all water is connected."

The nameless child, going from Molay (daughter) to "the bride" to Ammachi (little mother, when she takes on her widowed groom's little boy), might seem more what than who — but she quickly becomes the very heart of her husband's life and of Parambil, the vast estate that he has carved out of the jungle.

But " why here ?" the young bride wonders about Parambil, " away from water? " — and we get our first view of the curse that haunts the family she has married into. The Condition, she comes to call it: an inability to survive in water, however harmless-seeming or shallow, deaths by drowning in every generation going back as far as records reach.

Like Verghese's acclaimed novel "Cutting for Stone," this one features a medical component — involving the Parambil family but also a young Scottish doctor who comes to India for training, and stays — so The Condition migrates from the world of folklore to the realm of science.

Meanwhile, we follow the family through the particulars of love and sorrow and the benign and grotesque turns of fate (the grotesque seemingly having the upper hand), along the way acquiring prodigious knowledge about the history of South India, the Saint Thomas Christians of Kerala, physiology, language,and the practices of cooking, making art and medicine — some of the surgeries so minutely described that you might feel prepared to perform them yourself. (But don't.)

These details emerge naturally from the preoccupations and circumstances of Verghese's characters (Here, for instance, is the Scottish doctor gazing at a lovely woman: "The brow, the nose, the ramp of her upper lip with its Cupid's bow giving way to the vermilion border of the lower lip, then gliding over her thyroid cartilage, her cricoid, to the tender hollow above her breastbone"), which is what gives this book, so epic in scale, such intimacy and immediacy.

These lives, so finely drawn and intensely felt, are at once singular and inextricably bound together within the immensity of fate and faith — like "the water that connects them all in time and space and always has. The water ... first stepped into 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 inescapably by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone."

Ellen Akins is a writer and a teacher of writing in Wisconsin.

The Covenant of Water

By: Abraham Verghese.

Publisher: Grove Press, 724 pages, $30.

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BookBrowse Reviews The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

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The Covenant of Water

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• May 2, 2023, 736 pages

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A sumptuous literary masterpiece recreates a bygone era in South India through a family whose strongest bonds are linked to a mysterious affliction that haunts multiple generations.

"The tree on her lap lacks symmetry and is devastatingly accurate. She understands at once that it is a catalog of the malady that has shattered the Parambil family, but unlike Matthew's gospel, this is a secret document, hidden in the rafters, to be viewed only by family members, and only when they absolutely must see it."

"Digby stares at the most astonishing sight framed by the surgical towels: a scrotum ballooned beyond the size of a watermelon, now reaching the kneecaps. The penis is buried in the swelling like a belly button in an obese abdomen."

Digby's panic is allayed by the appearance of the head matron, the no-nonsense Honorine, who reassures him the operation is no different than what he has already done back in Scotland, only the pathology is magnified. In Verghese's elegant prose, the moment moves from the absurd to the transcendent: "That word captures Digby's first impression of India. It is a term he'll use often when a familiar disease takes on grotesque proportions in the tropics: 'magnified.'" Magnified is also an apt way to characterize a book weighing in at 736 pages. Verghese sustains this massive story with numerous enigmatic and vividly drawn characters like Big Ammachi, Digby, a Swedish physician named Rune who runs a colony for lepers, Philipose and his love Elsie, who is born to be an artist of staggering genius if only the world will let her. However, running like a riptide beneath the waters of the Malabar Coast, the Condition strikes the family in new, unbidden and heartbreaking ways. It will reach a crescendo with Mariamma, Big Ammachi's granddaughter, who becomes a neurosurgeon to unlock the secrets of this affliction, only to face the secrets "that can bind them together or bring them to their knees when revealed." She will come to understand how the Condition takes away but also gives gifts one may not have wanted. Set against the backdrop of India's journey from the yoke of British colonialism to partition, independence and violent Naxalite revolutionary movements, Abraham Verghese's first novel since Cutting for Stone (2009) is a lush, literary masterpiece—written with a surgeon's skill and an artist's eye—that delivers a rich, emotional return on the reader's investment.

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Beyond the Book:    Saint Thomas Christians

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Book Reviews

'the covenant of water' tells the story of three generations in south india.

Jenny Bhatt

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.

We would also do well to consider Covenant as part of the Indian novel in English lineage that includes literary greats like Raja Rao, K Nagarajan, O V Vijayan, and R K Narayan. Like the unforgettable rural South Indian worlds those authors bestowed upon us with places like Kanthapura, Kedaram, Khasak, and Malgudi, respectively, Verghese has given us Parambil, a water-filled, near-mythical dreamscape in Kerala. Rao's immortal opening line for his Kanthapura fits Verghese's Covenant too: "There is no village in India, however mean, that has not a rich sthalapurana, or legendary history, of its own." And, like Rao's story, Verghese's also opens with a storytelling grandmother.

Drawing on ancient Malayali Christian communal histories that reach back to 52 A.D. with St. Thomas' arrival in India, this story is about the ebbs and flows of lives across three generations from 1900 to the late-1970s. As various historical events of both British and then independent India unfold, we experience them through the loves and losses of a cast of characters that keeps growing like a nodal system with ever-multiplying branches and intersections.

Mariamma, a 12-year-old child bride, marries a 40-year-old widower and becomes the mistress of 500 acres of Parambil. Her husband's family has a secret medical "condition" where water is the cause of death for members in each generation. Big Ammachi, as she comes to be known, experiences many joys and sorrows from that early age until her passing. Though she remains in Parambil all her life, the human and spirit worlds forever intervene. Her wide-open heart takes in everything and everyone, no matter if they bring pain or comfort.

That kind of capaciousness is also a notable stylistic quality of the novel. At times, we might wonder why almost every character has a backstory or why certain subplots exist. Ever the skillful surgeon, Verghese threads meaningful connections between macrocosmic and microcosmic details so elegantly that they are often barely noticeable at first. For example, the parallel narratives of the Parambil family, the Scottish doctor Digby Kilgour, and the Swedish doctor Rune Orquist seem like they could each be entire novels on their own. Instead, Verghese takes his time to reveal how everything, like the waterways there, is connected and eventually flows together.

In turn, our readerly patience is well-rewarded. Whether describing the spice craze sweeping across Europe, Kerala's breathtaking coastal views, the overpowering Madras evening breezes, or the lively Anglo-Indian enclaves, Verghese tends to the lyrical. But he writes with such singular detail and restrained precision that it is a pleasure to be swept along and immersed deeper. Even the characters who only appear for a few paragraphs leave lasting impressions because each is diagrammed as essential to the novel's anatomy. And Verghese does not miss any opportunity to inject humor, including about Malayali culture. For example: "Because if there's one thing Malayalis fear, it's missing out when there's reaping to be done."

The most impressive sequences are, of course, the many medical scenes. It would be fair to say that Covenant is also a novel charting the history of disease, medicine, and surgery in India from 1900 onward. Besides the "condition," Verghese explores how science and people's attitudes evolved progressively toward leprosy, childbirth, drug addiction, and more. This, in itself, is groundbreaking for an Indian novel. There are also reflective musings about what genetic inheritance means beyond the body, the necessary place of art in our lives, how social hierarchies determine far-reaching life trajectories, and how we must understand the past to live in the present.

Yet, despite the panoramic coverage of a momentous modern historical period of the Indian subcontinent and the inclusion of vital East-West encounters in various plotlines, this is not a narrative of overt political resistance against the colonizers and their local accomplices. While Verghese sprinkles critical observations about how they exploited India, the Western characters are far from villainous caricatures. Towards the end, Verghese shows his sociopolitical leanings more clearly by bringing in the formative phase of the Naxalite movement as it spread from West Bengal to some parts of South India, including Kerala. Initially, this also reads like a parallel narrative deserving of an entire novel. Trust — Verghese loops it back smoothly onto the story's central spine.

In his introduction, Verghese says this about writing the novel during the pandemic: "The day job was never more challenging than when Covid arrived; the prevailing emotion I felt — that of finding meaning in a world where there is much suffering — no doubt infuses the book." It is entirely to Verghese's credit, then, that we are driven to finish the novel's 700-some pages even while grieving and raging over all the tragic deaths and losses. It's like something one of Big Ammachi's children says somewhere in the middle of the book; Philipose, who grows up to become a renowned writer and marry a gifted artist, offers this heartfelt, resonating sentiment:

"Ammachi, when I come to the end of a book, and I look up, just four days have passed. But in that time, I've lived through three generations and learned more about the world and about myself than I do during a year in school. Ahab, Queequeg, Ophelia, and other characters die on the page so that we might live better lives."

We also look up from the final page, catch our breath, and nod in agreement.

Jenny Bhatt is a writer, literary translator, book critic, and the founder of Desi Books. She tweets at @jennybhatt .

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Book Review :: The Covenant of Water

It has been 14 years since Abraham Verghese published Cutting for Stone , a book that easily ranks in my top five favorites of all time. With The Covenant of Water , readers are gifted another richly layered familial story of love, heartache, faith, loyalty, betrayal, and forgiveness. It is set in the very southern tip of the Indian coast – present-day Kerala – and also where Verghese’s own family is from.

“A tale that leaves its imprint on a listener tells the truth about how the world lives, and so, unavoidably, it is about families, their victories and wounds, and their departed, including the ghosts who linger; it must offer instructions for living in God’s realm, where joy never spares one from sorrow. A good story goes beyond what a forgiving God cares to do: it reconciles families and unburdens them of secrets whose bond is stronger than blood. But in their revealing, as in their keeping, secrets can tear a family apart.”

The story begins in 1900 as 12-year-old Ammachi leaves her family to travel a half-day by boat away to the 500-acre homestead called Parambil. There, she’s to marry a widower and raise his 2-year-old son, JoJo.

A physician by trade, Verghese (as he did in Cutting for Stone ) makes good use of his expertise in The Covenant of Water – he crafts the narrative around an odd “Condition” that seems prevalent in the central family.

In this story, a marriage broker says that what makes a family are the secrets it shares. This family’s secret is the source of mystery and myth, perhaps a curse that has been mapped on a hand-drawn family tree and secretly passed down by its matrons. The parchment warns of the danger lurking in rivers and streams, but also cooking pots and shallow puddles.

A danger ever-present in a “ world of rivulets and canals, a latticework of lakes and lagoons, a maze of backwaters and bottle green lotus ponds ” – a place ill-suited for a family with a preponderance of drowning. There is so much water that when people “ say ‘land’ they include water, because it makes no more sense to separate the two than it does to detach the nose from the mouth. ” And so, perhaps drowning should be normal.

In actuality, the Condition is a rare inherited medical trait.

If the Condition is the skeleton, the flesh and bones of The Covenant of Water are three generations of a family – their marriages and children, as well as others – friends and laborers (who are sometimes both at once) – that live within Parambil.

By the 1970s, Ammachi’s granddaughter Mariamma – a physician specializing in neurology – applies science to her family’s Condition to protect future generations. At the same time, she uncovers a deeper secret held by the prior two generations that threatens to unravel all she has known to be true.

The story that binds Ammachi and Mariamma spans the decades that challenged the traditional roles set by caste and gender and race. While society reckons with its own progression, both women must decide if they will love in spite of circumstances and forgive despite the consequences.

Like its predecessor, The Covenant of Water provides characters and scenes that stay with you long after the story closes, and its broad thematic exploration offers much to be savored. While many book clubs may shy away from selecting the 730+ page tome, those who do will be richly rewarded with an excellent discussion.

And also like its predecessor, The Covenant of Water is well positioned to be the best book I read this year.

I was provided an advanced reader copy of The Covenant of Water by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. To learn more, go to  netgalley.com .   The Covenant of Water is available to all readers beginning May 2, 2023. The quotes in this review were validated in the final published work.

Book Club Prompts for The Covenant of Water

Discuss “secrets whose bond is stronger than blood” from the quote above. Where did this theme emerge in The Covenant of Water ?

Ammachi and Elsie both marry into the family of Parambil – one by choice and the other not. How are they and their marriages similar and different?

How does the choice between whether or not to forgive play out differently for the various characters?

Verghese spends a fair amount of time giving the religious history of the region and its connection to St. Thomas. In what ways does this Christian heritage and foundation contribute to the book’s characters, themes, and narrative?

Discuss promises kept and promises broken and the consequences of each.

Which characters have their “lot in life” cast for them and which ones have a choice? In what way does this impact their happiness or fulfillment?

Discuss the two “communities of affliction” portrayed in the novel – Parambil and St. Bridget’s. How are they similar and different?

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Review: The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

If you’re reading this review because you loved Cutting for Stone by Verghese, that’s exactly why I picked out The Covenant of Water on NetGalley and was SO stoked when the publisher granted me access. It was definitely an epic story similar to Cutting for Stone , but was it as good? Read on to find out what I thought!

The Summary

From the New York Times–bestselling author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and magisterial new epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala and following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret

The Covenant of Water is the long-awaited new novel by Abraham Verghese, the author of Cutting for Stone . Published in 2009, Cutting for Stone became a literary phenomenon, selling over 1.5 million copies in the United States alone and remaining 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. The family is part of a Christian community that traces itself to the time of the apostles, but times are shifting, and the matriarch of this family, known as Big Ammachi—literally “Big Mother”—will witness unthinkable changes at home and at large over the span of her extraordinary life. All of Verghese’s great gifts are on display in this new work: there are astonishing scenes of medical ingenuity, fantastic moments of humor, a surprising and deeply moving story, and characters imbued with the essence of life.

A shimmering evocation of a lost 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 hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. It is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.

As I sit here watching my blinking curser, I’m wondering where to start with this book. Man, it was a lot. Good a lot, mostly!

The first thing I noticed was the time investment I’d need to put into it. I didn’t look at how long it was before requesting it on NetGalley, but when I finished the first chapter and my Kindle was telling me it would take 18 more hours to read the whole thing, I just about had a fit 😆. Not only is it over 700 pages, but I also wouldn’t really call it a book that reads quickly. There’s a lot going on that you don’t want to miss, plus quite a few unfamiliar words and names to stumble a little over.

Anyway, once I got over the fact that it was going to take me forever to read, I settled in and was really enjoying it. I really had no idea about the history of South India’s Malabar Coast, so it really was fascinating. It begins with the marriage of a child to a grown man, but she (Big Ammachi) lives with him for several years until anything is consummated. Everything about this was fascinating to read, especially the customs and rules and the overall lay of the land.

Man, Verghese can set a scene. The tropical forests came alive for me, which made it all into a pretty epic movie in my head the whole time. The characters were also like real people to me, like I was there.

There’s a lot of tragedy in this book, but also a lot of beauty, and that juxtaposition makes this book really, truly beautiful. I will say, though, that the tragedy almost got to be too much for me. If I’m going to stick through such a long book, it can’t be all drudgery. Just when things were getting too bleak, though, the story would switch or something would happen to draw me in again.

Speaking of story switching, this book is in chunks. You read one character’s bit, then you move on to another, and another, and then return to the first. While I did enjoy the way all the stories worked together, it was hard to get invested in one story just to be ripped away to one of the other characters’ story lines.

If you read other reviews of The Covenant of Water , you’ll probably find some that are critical of just how much history and politics Verghese jam packs into this book. And, well, they’re right – there’s a lot. For the most part, though, it added to the story. It’s really epic, really involved, and just like a whole historical novel that delivers on the historical bit in a pretty big way.

Then there’s yet another layer: the medical stuff. Just like Cutting for Stone , this novel really holds a lot of truly interesting medical history. I will completely agree with the summary when it says the book is “ a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. ” I especially love the mysticism in the beginning of this “condition” that’s passed down from generation to generation and they have no idea what it is, then suddenly in the 70s, the science is there to try to figure it out.

Overall, I loved The Covenant of Water . However, I did knock one star off because it was SO long, SO history and detail packed, and…well, epic. It really is an amazing work of art and an engrossing read, and I do recommend it to anyone who loved Cutting for Stone or likes these kinds of epic literary novels. Just do what I did and listen to a few audiobooks in between some of the cutaways to the other characters to give yourself some time to take it all in.

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The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

• Publication Date: May 2, 2023
• Genres: Fiction , Historical Fiction
• Hardcover: 736 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press
• ISBN-10: 0802162177
• ISBN-13: 9780802162175
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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2023

New York Times Bestseller

THE COVENANT OF WATER

by Abraham Verghese ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 2, 2023

By God, he's done it again.

Three generations of a South Indian family are marked by passions and peccadillos, conditions and ambitions, interventions both medical and divine.

"Where the sea meets white beach, it thrusts fingers inland to intertwine with the rivers snaking down the green canopied slopes of the Ghats. It is a child’s fantasy world of rivulets and canals, a latticework of lakes and lagoons, a maze of backwaters and bottle-green lotus ponds; a vast circulatory system because, as her father used to say, all water is connected." Verghese's narrative mirrors the landscape it is set in, a maze of connecting storylines and biographies so complex and vast that it's almost a little crazy. But as one of the characters points out, "You can't set out to achieve your goals without a little madness." The madness begins in 1900, when a 12-year-old girl is married off to a widower with a young son. She will be known as Ammachi, "little mother," before she's even a teenager. Her life is the central stream that flows through the epic landscape of this story, in which drowning is only the most common of the disastrous fates Verghese visits on his beloved characters—burning, impaling, leprosy, opium addiction, hearing loss, smallpox, birth defects, political fanaticism, and so much more, though many will also receive outsized gifts in artistic ability, intellect, strength, and prophecy. As in the bestselling and equally weighty Cutting for Stone (2009), the fiction debut by Verghese (who's also a physician), the medical procedures and advances play a central role—scenes of hand surgery and brain surgery are narrated with the same enthusiastic detail as scenes of lovemaking. A few times along this very long journey one may briefly wonder, Is all this really necessary? What a joy to say it is, to experience the exquisite, uniquely literary delight of all the pieces falling into place in a way one really did not see coming. As Ammachi is well aware by the time she is a grandmother in the 1970s, "A good story goes beyond what a forgiving God cares to do: it reconciles families and unburdens them of secrets whose bond is stronger than blood."

Pub Date: May 2, 2023

ISBN: 9780802162175

Page Count: 736

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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BOOK REVIEW

by Abraham Verghese

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SEEN & HEARD

PERSPECTIVES

THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring  passeurs : people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the  Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

More by Kristin Hannah

by Kristin Hannah

BOOK TO SCREEN

THE GOD OF THE WOODS

by Liz Moore ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 2, 2024

"Don't go into the woods" takes on unsettling new meaning in Moore's blend of domestic drama and crime novel.

Many years after her older brother, Bear, went missing, Barbara Van Laar vanishes from the same sleepaway camp he did, leading to dark, bitter truths about her wealthy family.

One morning in 1975 at Camp Emerson—an Adirondacks summer camp owned by her family—it's discovered that 13-year-old Barbara isn't in her bed. A problem case whose unhappily married parents disdain her goth appearance and "stormy" temperament, Barbara is secretly known by one bunkmate to have slipped out every night after bedtime. But no one has a clue where's she permanently disappeared to, firing speculation that she was taken by a local serial killer known as Slitter. As Jacob Sluiter, he was convicted of 11 murders in the 1960s and recently broke out of prison. He's the one, people say, who should have been prosecuted for Bear's abduction, not a gardener who was framed. Leave it to the young and unproven assistant investigator, Judy Luptack, to press forward in uncovering the truth, unswayed by her bullying father and male colleagues who question whether women are "cut out for this work." An unsavory group portrait of the Van Laars emerges in which the children's father cruelly abuses their submissive mother, who is so traumatized by the loss of Bear—and the possible role she played in it—that she has no love left for her daughter. Picking up on the themes of families in search of themselves she explored in  Long Bright River (2020), Moore draws sympathy to characters who have been subjected to spousal, parental, psychological, and physical abuse. As rich in background detail and secondary mysteries as it is, this ever-expansive, intricate, emotionally engaging novel never seems overplotted. Every piece falls skillfully into place and every character, major and minor, leaves an imprint.

Pub Date: July 2, 2024

ISBN: 9780593418918

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: April 13, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

More by Liz Moore

by Liz Moore

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The Covenant of Water (Oprah's Book Club) Kindle Edition

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.

• Print length 775 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Grove Press
• Publication date May 2, 2023
• File size 5258 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
• See all details

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From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com review.

Praise for  The Covenant of Water :

*OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK* 

Longlisted for the New American Voices Award 

An Instant New York Times Bestseller

An Amazon Top 10 Book of the Month

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

Named a Best Book of the Year So Far by TIME , Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and AARP

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 detail combine to create breathtaking, edge-of-your-seat scenes of survival and medical procedures that are difficult to forget. Tenderness permeates every page, at the same time as he is ruthless with the many ways his characters are made vulnerable by simply being alive. Those scenes when a person must fight for their life make for some of the most gripping episodes that I have read in some time.”— Maaza Mengiste, The Guardian

“In the spirit of his breakout novel,  Cutting for Stone , Abraham Verghese offers an epic melodrama of medicine . . . The miraculous melds naturally with medicine in  The Covenant of Water , whether in the form of artistic inspiration or religious awakening . . . Most remarkably, this depth of emotion comes across even in descriptions of surgery, which one would expect to be faceless and technical, if not merely sickening. But not so in the taut depiction of a skin graft for a burn victim or a trepanning procedure to relieve a man’s swollen brain of fluid.”— Sam Sacks,  Wall Street Journal

“Over the course of three generations, two seemingly disparate, deeply connected narratives unfold in an ode to India, family, and medical marvels.”— TIME

“[A] surreal and sweeping epic.”— Vanity Fair

“Life unspools across seven decades, during which time Big Ammachi’s loved ones suffer maladies that are treated by practitioners of both traditional and Western medicine. The novel is a searching consideration of the extent to which seemingly contrary approaches to healing can coalesce.”— New Yorker , “Briefly Noted”

“Wow. This novel is long but Abraham Verghese is a master . . . A brutally intimate look at a mother’s love and the power of family, The Covenant of Water will go down as a classic.”— Zibby Owens, Good Morning America

“This book is gorgeous and truly immersive . . . I’m sad it’s over.”— Ann Napolitano, author of the New York Times bestseller Hello Beautiful

“When you come to the end of Abraham Verghese’s new novel,  The Covenant of Water , you will feel that you have lived among the Indian and Anglo-Indian characters who populate its pages for almost a century. It’s that long. But it’s also that immersive—appropriately enough for a book so steeped in the medium and metaphor of water, as the title suggests . . . These lives, so finely drawn and intensely felt, are at once singular and inextricably bound together within the immensity of fate and faith—like 'the water that connects them all in time and space and always has.’”— Ellen Akins,  Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Fourteen years in the making, Abraham Verghese’s  The Covenant of Water was worth the wait . . . A massive achievement. Rarely can such an intricate story, following a dozen major characters over more than 70 years, be described as flying by, but this one does . . . [Verghese] goes deeply into the history and culture of southern India while telling a story so engaging and lyrical it never seems academic . . .  The Covenant of Water is a rousing good story, full of joy and tragedy and humor and beauty and ugliness—sometimes all at once . . . Verghese is a master at keeping these disparate characters on parallel paths that converge down the line. If you ever think he is wandering astray, be assured that he isn’t. All will come together in the end in a way that may make you gasp in appreciation. Throughout, Verghese woos us with beautiful language.”— Gail Pennington,  Saint Louis Post-Dispatch

“Sweeping, intimate yet vast . . . Languorous and often lyrical, morally ambitious.”— Priscilla Gilman, Boston Globe

“ Cutting for Stone fans, rejoice! Abraham Verghese is back with another grand epic that will sweep you off your feet . . . Resounding and astounding, intimate and expansive . . . Filled with shimmery, charismatic people who love deeply and dream big, The Covenant of Water is an entirely magnetic read that you won’t want to end.”— Al Woodworth, Amazon Book Review

“A family in Kerala, India, is affected with the Condition: Each generation one person dies by drowning. For more than 70 years Big Ammachi survives tragedy and triumph, growing from a 12-year-old bride into the matriarch as her country also comes into its own.”— Kate Tuttle,  People , “Best New Books”

“Ever since  Cutting for Stone , we have been eagerly awaiting another book by Abraham Verghese, and what a breathtaking return this is . . . An extraordinary look at what past generations have endured for the sake of the present, Verghese’s tribute to 20th century India is a literary feat you won’t want to miss.”— Brittany Bunzey,  Barnes & Noble Reads

“Come to this epic novel by Verghese for the history of Kerala, India; stay for the devoted elephant. The bestselling author (and Stanford doctor) recounts the Parambil family’s ups and downs through a century of change, interlaying some of his medical expertise but never losing his commitment to how love allows people—and sometimes beasts—to choose goodness and care over politics and brutality.”— Los Angeles Times

“Breathtaking . . . The book beautifully explores the lessons we learn from our ancestors in an always changing world.”— Real Simple

“Abraham Verghese is a masterful writer. Each page in this massive book features exquisite descriptions, evocations of a particular time and place, populated by fascinating characters . . . A gem of a book.”— New York Journal of Books

“A novel so rich, so heavy with wisdom, authentic and fabricated history, and family stories snaking back through the years and heavy wet vines and red soil, between the stocky legs of Damodaran, the elephant who stands guard at Parambil . . . Allow yourself to become immersed in the laughter and tears, and discover the unclaimed secrets of this epic, wonderful novel.”— Book Reporter

“An unforgettable journey of faith, medicine and love . . . A lush, literary masterpiece—written with a surgeon’s skill and an artist’s eye—that delivers a rich, emotional return on the reader’s investment.”— BookBrowse

“Both a compassionate family saga and an account of medicine, politics, art, women’s rights, and the legacy of British colonialism in India . . . Vast in scope and also surprisingly intimate, Verghese’s novel covers most of the 20th century in India, but is ultimately the story of a family—blood and chosen—caring for each other through all of life’s challenges and changes.”— Shelf Awareness

“Three generations of a South Indian family are marked by passions and peccadillos, conditions and ambitions, interventions both medical and divine . . . As in the bestselling and equally weighty  Cutting for Stone , the fiction debut by Verghese (who’s also a physician), the medical procedures and advances play a central role—scenes of hand surgery and brain surgery are narrated with the same enthusiastic detail as scenes of lovemaking. A few times along this very long journey one may briefly wonder, Is all this really necessary? What a joy to say it is, to experience the exquisite, uniquely literary delight of all the pieces falling into place in a way one really did not see coming . . . By God, he’s done it again.”— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A literary landmark, a monumental treatment of family and country, as sprawling in scope as Edna Ferber’s  Giant . . . Writing with compassion and insight, Verghese creates distinct characters in Dickensian profusion, and his language is striking; even graphic descriptions of medical procedures are beautifully wrought. Throughout, there are joy, courage, and devotion, as well as tragedy; always there is water, the covenant that links all.”— Library Journal  (starred review)

“Instantly and utterly absorbing is the so-worth-the-wait new novel by the author of  Cutting for Stone . . . Verghese—who gifts the matriarch his mother’s name and even some of her stories—illuminates colonial history, challenges castes and classism, and exposes injustices, all while spectacularly spinning what will undoubtedly be one of the most lauded, awarded, best-selling novels of the year.”— Terry Hong,  Booklist (starred review)

“Breathtaking . . . By the end, Verghese perfectly connects the wandering threads . . . Verghese outdoes himself with this grand and stunning tribute to 20th-century India.”— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A masterpiece. Put it on your bookcase next to  A Passage to India by E.M. Forster or anything by the brave and brilliant Salman Rushdie. Indeed, put it next to any great novel of your choice. Sprawling, passionate, tragic and comedic at turns . . . Verghese, probably the best doctor-writer since Anton Chekhov, upends all of our expectations . . . You won’t want it to end.”— BookPage  (starred review)

“Reading  The Covenant of Water  I felt as if I’d been plunged into an atmosphere thicker than air, or as if I was swimming in a sea of stories, each more intense and unforgettable than the last.”— Sandra Cisneros, author of  Woman Without Shame

“From the very first page of Abraham Verghese’s  The Covenant of Water , I was overtaken with joy. Truly, I caught my breath, absorbing such beauty. What a sure faith this novel is—what an agreement with language. What a glorious story of land and family. What a brilliant path written across generations.”— Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author  The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“ The Covenant of Water is a brilliant novel, one I feel lucky to experience. It is enthralling; its conjured worlds vigorous and astonishing; its characters so real they call me back to their lives. I wanted to read this book for whole days and nights, and do little else.”— Megha Majumdar, author of  A Burning

“This majestic, sweeping story of family secrets—their curse, their legacy, and their cure—is intimate and profound. Abraham Verghese takes us on a journey across nearly a century and more than one continent, all the while dazzling with his rich, elegant prose. Verghese is a literary legend at the height of his extraordinary powers.”— Dani Shapiro, author of  Signal Fires

“A novel of utter beauty,   The Covenant of Water  is worthy of all praise in its depiction of medical ingenuity and family love; it is epic and eye-opening, the sort of story that only a singular mind like Abraham Verghese’s could have woven.”— Imbolo Mbue, author of  How Beautiful We Were

“Abraham Verghese makes good on the novelist’s covenant with the reader—trust me with your attention and I will reward you with a tale worth inhabiting. With a plot both deliciously languorous and breathtakingly taut, Verghese takes us on a monumental journey over generations and continents, over languages and cultures, across tendons and sinews, and through to human nature at its beating heart. It left me breathless and pining for more.”— Danielle Ofri, author of  What Doctors Feel

Praise for  Cutting for Stone :

“A winner . . . Filled with mystical scenes and deeply felt characters . . . Verghese is something of a magician as a novelist.”— USA Today

“Beautiful . . . Amazing.”— New Yorker

“Verghese creates this story so lovingly that it is actually possible to live within it for the brief time one spends with this book. You may never leave the chair.”— Los Angeles Times

“Tremendous . . . Vivid and thrilling . . . I feel lucky to have gotten to read it.”— Atul Gawande

“Absorbing, exhilarating.”— Seattle Times

“Engrossing . . . Endearing . . . A passionate, vivid, and informative novel.” — Boston Globe

“The novel is full of compassion and wise vision . . . I feel I changed forever after reading this book.”— Sandra Cisneros,  San Antonio Express-News

“Stupendous . . . An epic medical romance, surgery meets history. Beautiful and deeply affecting.”— Financial Times

“Vivid . . .  Cutting for Stone shines.”— Washington Post Book World

“A masterpiece . . . Verghese expertly weaves the threads of numerous story lines into one cohesive opus.”— San Francisco Chronicle

“Vastly entertaining and enlightening.”— Tracy Kidder

“Wildly imaginative . . . A lovely ode to the medical profession.”— Entertainment Weekly

“Compelling . . . Readers will put this novel down at book’s end knowing that it will stick with them for a long time to come.”— St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Fantastic . . . Written with a lyrical flair, told through a compassionate first-person point of view, and rich with medical insight and information.”— Houston Chronicle

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 1.5 million copies in the U.S. alone. It was translated into more than twenty languages and is being adapted for film by Anonymous Content. Verghese was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2016, has received five honorary degrees, and is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He lives and practices medicine in Stanford, California where he is the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine. A decade in the making, The Covenant of Water is his first book since Cutting for Stone .

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0BJSGV831
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Grove Press (May 2, 2023)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 2, 2023
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 5258 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 775 pages
• #6 in Medical Fiction (Kindle Store)
• #7 in Medical Fiction (Books)
• #48 in Literary Fiction (Kindle Store)

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About the author, abraham verghese.

ABRAHAM VERGHESE is the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor and Vice Chair of Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine. He sees patients, teaches students, and writes.

From 1990 to 1991, Abraham Verghese attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop at The University of Iowa, where he obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree.

His first book, MY OWN COUNTRY, about AIDS in rural Tennessee, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1994 and was made into a movie directed by Mira Nair and starring Naveen Andrews, Marisa Tomei, Glenne Headley and others.

His second book, THE TENNIS PARTNER, was a New York Times notable book and a national bestseller.

His third book, CUTTING FOR STONE was an epic love story, medical story and family saga. It appeared in hardback in 2009, and is in its 9th printing and is being translated into 16 languages. It is a Vintage paperback and was on the New York Times bestseller list for over 110 weeks at this writing.

His latest novel, THE COVENANT OF WATER, is forthcoming from Grove Press (May 2, 2023).

Verghese has honorary degrees from five universities and has published extensively in the medical literature, and his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Granta, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama in 2016.

His writing, both non-fiction and fiction, has to do with his view of medicine as a passionate and romantic pursuit; he sees the bedside skill and ritual of examining the patient as critical, cost saving, time-honored and necessary, though it is threatened in this technological age. He coined the term the 'iPatient' to describe the phenomenon of the virtual patient in the computer becoming the object of attention to the detriment of the real patient in the bed. His is an important voice for humanism in medicine and for anticipating the unwanted consequences of new technologies before they are introduced.

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Customers find the storyline rich and well-written. They also praise the writing style as beautiful, meticulously woven, and an amazing accomplishment of research. Customers describe the characters as rich, well-defined, and smart. They find the emotional intensity profound, unique, and impossible to forget. They describe the book as engaging and lovable. Opinions are mixed on the length and emotional tone, with some finding it very long and generous, while others say it's very long. Readers also disagree on the content, with others finding the medical knowledge fascinating and clear, while other find the descriptions of medical procedures absurd.

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Customers find the storyline rich, incredible, and beautifully written. They also say the book intertwines generations of families, both related by blood and related by spirit. Customers say the love expressed in the book is exquisite and overpowering. They say it's a study in humanity, family secrets, and friendships.

"...Through his vivid descriptions and keen insights, he delved into themes of identity, love, loss, and redemption, inviting readers to contemplate the..." Read more

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"...It was so well thought and interesting . Characters were very well developed and likable, and admirable...." Read more

"...It is very well written and tells a rich tale of several different people living very different lives in India who somehow in some way become..." Read more

Customers find the writing style very well written, lyrical, and evocative. They also appreciate the remarkable clarity and depth, and the beautifully woven together puzzle pieces. Overall, readers describe the book as an amazing accomplishment of research.

"...'s prose captured the essence of human experience with remarkable clarity and depth ...." Read more

"To me, this is a beautifully written study of the human condition in a country that I know little of and its history of which I know even less...." Read more

"I loved the way Verghese can weave a story. It was so well thought and interesting. Characters were very well developed and likable, and admirable...." Read more

"Though a very long book, I didn’t want the story to end. It is very well written and tells a rich tale of several different people living very..." Read more

Customers find the characters in the book rich and well-defined. They also say Tom is a remarkable man and his accomplishments with all his running marathons.

"...It makes her such an amazing character . It is impossible to not love the characters in this book. Thank you for writing this book." Read more

"...Characters were very well developed and likable , and admirable. What I didn’t like was the use of SO MANY Indian terms...." Read more

"...It was definitely captivating and the characters draw you in and when you read the book it feels like you are a fly on the wall...." Read more

" Excellent character development …. In two or three chapters rambles on and on about nothing…. But for the most part is a good read…." Read more

Customers find the book nuanced, beautiful, and fulfilling. They say it's a testament to the wonders of perseverance and love. Readers also say it transports them to another world, providing interesting insights into the Indian culture.

"...Each scene was meticulously crafted, evoking a range of emotions and prompting introspection long after the audiobook had ended...." Read more

"This book is beautifully written and transports the reader to another world , where stories are connected by water. It’s a long book, but worth it." Read more

"...it drew me into a world I knew nothing about, and kept me engaged for the entire trip - through a country, a family, and through a world where the..." Read more

"...It is not a sad book but a powerful book about a family ." Read more

Customers find the book engaging, absorbing, and overpowering at the same time. They also mention the characters are lovable and the story is well drawn.

"...The love express in this book is exquisite, and overpowering at the same time ...." Read more

"...It is a long book but never boring . Each chapter compels the reader to fully understand each character from each generation as it moves to the end...." Read more

"...Also, the middle part got kinda boring & drawn-out, to be honest...." Read more

"...The characters were interesting. They gave one a familiar feeling . Descriptions of villages and farms totally absorbed this reader." Read more

Customers are mixed about the book length. Some mention that it's long but written in short chapters. They also say it'd be a great book for those looking for a long book. However, some customers feel the book is too long.

"This is a very long book and it took me several chapters to get into it, especially since there are so many characters and the narrative jumps back..." Read more

"Though a very long book , I didn’t want the story to end...." Read more

"Beautifully written but way too long . The many Indian names and words were hard to remember...." Read more

"...It’s a long book , but worth it." Read more

Customers are mixed about the emotional tone. Some find the book full of heart-stopping human tragedy, horrifying, and haunting. They also say the writing has tears freely flowing and in other parts had them laughing. However, others say the tragedies are difficult, incredibly disturbing, and exhausting.

"...An emotional roller coaster that’s both heartwarming and heartbreaking ." Read more

"...It is also very shocking and sad many times over...." Read more

"...The humor is a bonus ; had me cackling repeatedly." Read more

"...Captivating and at times horrifying , enjoy the ride!" Read more

Customers are mixed about the content. Some find the medical knowledge fascinating, interesting, and enchanting. They also appreciate the clear historical and geographic setting and descriptions of India. However, some readers feel the book is weighed down by endless descriptions of medical procedures and Christian religious references.

"...characters and their journeys, infusing each moment with a palpable sense of authenticity ...." Read more

"...style of the author but found the different parts of the book a little disjointed with every new part added to the story line but it was worth going..." Read more

"...Verghese does a good job of incorporating medical , cultural, religious and political points and etail into the book...." Read more

"...knows his stuff , but, sorry, we’re not all doctors … Also, it was kinda gross , to be honest, at least, to me..." Read more

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The Covenant of Water

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, this epic of love, faith, and medicine 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. 

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Water Cycle Unit of Work LKS2

Subject: English

Age range: 7-11

Resource type: Unit of work

Last updated

2 September 2024

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A 2 week literacy unit designed for LKS2 linked to the book ‘The Rhythm of the Rain.’ The final outcome is a water cycle explanation text. I found this book worked wonders for consolidating the children’s understanding of the water cycle. As a result, it is an excellent book to use across the curriculum - particularly literacy and geography.

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Dalton Transactions

A critical review of nitrate reduction by nano zero-valent iron based composites for enhancing n2 selectivity.

Due to the highly reductive capacity of nano zero-valent iron(nZVI) nanoparticles, the reduction of nitrate (NO3--N) is prone to produce ammonia nitrogen (NH4+-N) as by-products and has low selectivity for nitrogen gas (N2). Water and dissolved oxygen (DO) in the solution consume electrons from nZVI, decreasing the efficiency of NO3--N reduction. In order to overcome the drawbacks of plain nZVI to remove NO3--N pollution, nZVI-based multifunctional materials were constructed to realize the selective conversion of NO3--N to N2 as well as the efficient removal of NO3--N. Therefore, the advanced research in the reduction of NO3--N by nZVI-based composites were comprehensively reviewed. Strategies to improve the NO3--N reduction efficiency and N2 selectivity were proposed. Moreover, the shortcomings of iron-based nanomaterials in NO3--N pollution control were summarized, and some suggestions for future research directions were provided.

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Y. Pei, J. Chen, W. Cheng, W. Huang, R. Liu and Z. W. Jiang, Dalton Trans. , 2024, Accepted Manuscript , DOI: 10.1039/D4DT02052A

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