The Covenant of Water (Oprah’s Book Club)

OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • From the New York Times-bestselling creator 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 unusual secret

“Probably the most 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 creator of the major word-of-mouth bestseller Cutting for Stone, which has sold over 1.5 million copies in the USA 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 odd affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is in every single place. 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, referred to as Big Ammachi—will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her abnormal life, full of joy and triumph in addition to 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 among the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.