A new incredible novel from the author of the bestseller “Stone-Cutting.” This is much more than an entertaining family saga. It’s a hymn to medical progress and human compassion—an wise and kind tale about the idea that a family is created not by blood ties, but by shared fate; that choice is always there, but strength to make it isn’t always; that all of us are forever connected to one another by our actions and inactions; and that no one remains alone.
1900, the Christian state of Kerala on the Malabar coast in southern India. A twelve-year-old girl mourning the death of her father is sent by boat… to marriage. She will have her wedding with a forty-year-old man she has never seen. So begins the journey of Big Ammachi—the matriarch of the Parambil estate—whose shoulders will fall the burden of a mysterious water curse that has tormented her husband’s family for years, and whose fearless heart will witness incredible changes throughout an extraordinary life filled with joy and triumph, as well as with deprivation and loss.
The novel’s plot spans almost the entire twentieth century and reaches the 1970s, but even there the story doesn’t end. Abraham Verghese is an outstanding doctor, one of America’s most respected physicians. His first novel “Stone-Cutting” spent 107 weeks at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, and in the United States alone more than 1.5 million copies were sold. In 2015, Verghese received the US National Humanities Medal. The new novel “The Covenant of Water” is a kaleidoscope of the author’s many great talents: medical ingenuity, sparkling humor, a deeply moving story, and vivid, bright, unforgettable characters.
In 2024, “The Covenant of Water” received the Edward Stanford Prize in the “Sense of Place” category for a stunning portrait of the Indian state of Kerala and the small town of Parambil. Poetic, musical narration was carefully brought into Russian by translator Maria Aleksandrova, and preserved in the audiobook version by Alexey Bagdasarov.