"The Covenant of Water," by Abraham Verghese

***With the weather not being great, we'll be meeting online now. You'll find the Zoom invitation link both in this meeting's location area and in an email sent out Friday at around 3:30 pm. (If you didn't receive the email, check your spam/junk folders.)***

The Ethiopian-Indian Stanford professor and physician has made a significant publishing career for himself--his earlier books you may have heard of include The Tennis Partner and Cutting For Stone, both having won multiple awards and achieving long-standing bestseller status. Verghese's own awards include the Heinz Awards, Writer in the World Award, and presidential National Humanities Medal. This, his latest work, became an instant bestseller in its own right in mid-2023 and was chosen for the Oprah Book Club. The audiobook has also been acclaimed. Let's go on the journey!

From Goodreads:

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.

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.