Covenant of Water, The

The Covenant of Wateris the long-awaited new novel by Abraham Verghese, the author of the major word-of-mouth bestsellerCutting for Stone, which has sold over 1.5 million copies in the United States alone and remained on theNew York Timesbestseller list for over two years.

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977,The Covenant of Wateris set in Kerala, on South Indias Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowningand in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Keralas 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 girland future matriarch, known as Big Ammachiwill 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 Wateris 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.