new york times book review the covenant of water

Oprah chose well. ‘The Covenant of Water’ is a rich, heartfelt novel.

A decade in the making, abraham verghese’s sweeping new book chronicles the evolution of a family in india that shares a dark secret.

Abraham Verghese — novelist (“Cutting for Stone”), doctor and professor of medicine — introduces his enormous new novel, “The Covenant of Water,” with a personal note to advance readers: His late mother, Mariam, “was an incredible storyteller” who “wrote a forty-page manuscript” in response to a grandchild’s query about her life. “In this novel,” Verghese declares, “I draw on some of those stories.” He dedicates the book — 10 years in the making — to his mother.

I can’t think of a mightier tribute. (Nor, apparently, can Oprah Winfrey, who has just announced this novel as her latest book club pick.) Set in the Kerala state of India, “Covenant” reads like a lavish smorgasbord of genealogy, medicine and love affairs, tracing a family’s evolution from 1900 through the 1970s, in pointillist detail. The family’s dark secret? “In every generation … at least one member has drowned unexpectedly” — even though those who sense they’re afflicted with “The Condition” try their utmost never to get wet.

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Artfully, Verghese shapes and links successive lives through wars, monsoons, famine (“the fruity, acetone odor of a body consuming itself, the scent of starvation”). Pivotal scenes are intensely physical; intimacy swept up into widescreen pageantry in the manner of “Dr. Zhivago”: floods, fires, pestilence, train journeys, teeming streets, far-flung characters coming face-to-face. Some of these coincidences test credulity — yet their urgency defeats doubt. Likewise, when loss and horror strike, they feel inevitable and real.

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. “Our young bride” — who becomes Big Ammachi (big mother), the saga’s unforgettable matriarchal backbone — rejoices in windfalls (births, friendships, including that of a beloved elephant) and grieves innumerable tragedies (some foreshadowed, others a shock). Local wit lightens up many of the proceedings: “Does he have a cow ready to calve back in the barn? … Did he leave the rice on the fire?” (What’s his hurry?) “A crying child is a breathing child.” (Prioritize emergencies.) “If brains were oil, that one didn’t have enough to prime the tiniest lamp.”

Abraham Verghese, author of ‘Cutting for Stone,’ describes his writing life

Verghese folds in major players, guiding them toward each other: the irresistible Digby Kilgour, a young medical graduate, migrates in 1933 from a nightmare childhood in Glasgow to Madras, India, to gain surgical experience: “The sight of suffering is familiar; its language transcends all borders.” Medical crises incite action throughout the novel, allowing Verghese to tap into his deep experience and endearingly humane philosophy. When Digby, badly burned in an accidental fire, flees to a remote leprosy sanctuary to recover, he is slowly repaired there by the (marvelously drawn) Swedish village doctor Rune Orqvist. These passages provide some of the book’s most moving and revelatory moments. Of Digby’s hands Verghese writes: “The spectacle of these ruined tools of a surgeon’s livelihood fills Rune with sorrow. This is, after all, his own nightmare, though in his dream the culprit is always leprosy. He is overcome. He takes a deep breath. The journey the two of them embark on together must begin with love, Rune thinks. To love the sick — isn’t that always the first step?”

Verghese’s technical strengths are consistent and versatile: crisp, taut pacing, sensuous descriptions that can fan out into rhapsody. Madras’s evening breeze carries “scents of orchids and salt, an airborne opiate that … finally lets one forget the brutal heat of the day,” a break from the riotous sense-assault of Madras itself: “odors of cured leather, cotton, dried fish, incense, and salt water, the top notes of the antique scent of this ancient civilization.” Verghese writes sex scenes with striking tenderness, as well as stunning accounts of birth and death struggles, graphic surgeries, mouthwatering food, and keen depictions of class and caste divisions in Glasgow and India.

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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. Writerly strokes may occasionally feel broad, but like animate oil paintings, their effect is rich and reverberant. The further into the novel readers sink, the more power it accrues.

Throughout, Verghese painstakingly weaves in his insatiable love for, and belief in, art and literature. When an eccentric neighbor teaches Ammachi’s son Philipose to read — starting with “Moby Dick”— Ammachi wonders: “Isn’t it one big lie?”

“It’s fiction!” thunders the old teacher. “Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!” Mother and son are quickly converted, hungry to read — and here Verghese secures his opus’s through-line. After reading a book, Philipose explains to Ammachi, “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.”

That’s surely its own covenant — a fitting mission statement for this grandly ambitious, impassioned work. “Covenant” is a magnificent feat.

Joan Frank’s latest books are “Late Work: A Literary Autobiography of Love, Loss, and What I Was Reading” and “Juniper Street: A Novel.”

The Covenant of Water

By Abraham Verghese

Grove. 736 pp. $32

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March 2024 Book Review | 'The Covenant of Water'

Dr. Abraham Verghese’s much-anticipated second novel, “The Covenant of Water," follows three generations of a family that suffers from a strange affliction or is it a curse?

Dr. Abraham Verghese’s 2009 bestseller “Cutting for Stone” sold over 1.5 million copies in the US alone. It was on the New York Times’ Bestseller list for two straight years. It’s been a 14-year gap, but in May 2023, his long-awaited second novel “The Covenant of Water” was published. It too, went right to the bestseller list.

Dr. Verghese admits it has taken some time for this second book but reminds us he does have a day job. In addition to being an author, Verghese is a physician, Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine and Vice Chair of Education at Stanford University Medical School.

His writing process begins with a general outline of the story mapped out on a white board. He knew he wanted a multi-generational tale with a good, strong mother-figure to carry the story and he created a wonderful one. His characters often make decisions along the way which change the course of the story.

The story begins in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast. In 1900, a 12-year-old girl is sent off to marry a man 30 years her senior and in time becomes the family matriarch known as Big Ammachi. Her presence is felt by every generation as the epic story unfolds. Deep within the dynamics of relationships and life experiences is hidden a family secret.

Oprah was among the first to sing the book’s praises when she selected it as the 101 st pick for her famous book club. She said it was one of the best books she’d ever read. “It’s epic. It’s transportive . . . It was unputdownable!”

Recognizing the 736-page length might be overwhelming for some readers, she allowed an extra month or two before even announcing the next book club pick. Because it’s in her top three books of all time, she’s doing her best to steward the book by negotiating for the rights for a screen version and doing a series of podcasts.

“The Covenant of Water” can be found at local libraries.

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese review – a curse in Kerala

Water affects a family’s fate in this enthralling epic from the physician-author, set across three generations

T he physician-writer Abraham Verghese’s riveting, sprawling epic opens with a mother and her 12-year-old daughter crying. It is 1900 in Travancore, south India, today part of Kerala, and in the morning, the frightened girl is to marry a man who is 40 and a widower. She will do as she is told but she cannot imagine the future ahead. Her mother reassures her but soon her voice ebbs, her breathing slows, and then she is asleep, leaving her daughter awake. The body’s need for rest overtakes the mother’s anguish. And we are thus ushered into the next day and the girl’s journey on a boat far from her childhood home.

Big Ammachi, as the girl will come to be known, will grow to love her husband; he, in turn, will treat her like the child she is for several more years. By the time she is 17, she will give birth to her first child, a daughter named Baby Mol. They live on their estate, Parambil, the labour handled dutifully by a man named Shamuel, who is part of the landless caste called the pulayan . Big Ammachi eventually has a son, Philipose, and he and Shamuel’s young son, Joppan, are playmates, but when a school official prohibits Joppan from attending class, Big Ammachi finds herself struggling to explain the caste system that is forcing the friends to live increasingly segregated lives. “Its roots are deep and so ancient that it feels like a law of nature, like rivers going to the sea. But the pain in those innocent eyes reminds her of what is so easy to forget: the caste system is an abomination.” Decades later, Philipose and Joppan will have uncomfortable conversations about what is owed by landowners to the pulayan, but any lingering anger that Joppan might have is put off for another generation.

Spanning from 1900 to 1977 in Kerala, The Covenant of Water reveals some of the contradictions of living in a colonised, segregated society. Dr Digby Kilgour, the lonely son of an impoverished alcoholic mother, flees Scotland for colonised India, only to discover that he is “oppressed in Glasgow; oppressor here. The thought depresses him.” Yet the complicated questions that might develop as he negotiates with those increasingly fraught realities are set aside while he contends with his new hospital job and begins an affair with a woman who is married to a colleague. Tensions rise as that colleague makes a fatal medical error and places the blame on Digby. Any confrontation that would have occurred, however, is derailed by an accident that conveniently pushes Digby’s storyline in another direction.

Big Ammachi watches her family expand and shrink through births and tragic deaths that involve a family curse connected to water. India gains independence. Her granddaughter, her namesake, enters medical school and tries to find the cause for this curse. Other characters make their appearance and multiple plotlines converge through encounters that rely heavily on coincidence and sudden incidents. Over the course of the book, people do not change as much as accumulate and shoulder new experiences.

The psychological and emotional growth that could have fostered deeper understandings and greater revelations remains unexplored. Verghese chooses instead to reckon with biological realities: disfiguring scars and developmental challenges, incurable afflictions and hereditary diseases, fatal accidents and debilitating addictions. The novel’s authority lies not in the excavation of psychological ambiguities, but in the dawning awareness that each character is beholden to something much more powerful and more encompassing than emotional turmoil: the physical bodies they inhabit.

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.

At the beginning of the book, Big Ammachi, the young bride, looks out at her new home. 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”. This concept of connectedness, the sense of family that can extend to those unrelated by blood, is carried through nearly every chapter of this novel. “This is the covenant of water,” a character thinks towards the end, “that they’re all linked inescapably by their acts of commission and omission and no one stands alone.”

The Covenant of Water contains a larger question of community and belonging, one that feels most important in these days of escalating political wars and tensions: is it possible to be fragile and wounded, and still necessary and loved? The answer is rendered with care by a writer who looks at the world with a doctor’s knowing, merciful gaze. As much as any moral reckoning or catastrophic plot point, this is why literature, in all its comforting and challenging forms, matters.

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The Covenant of Water

By Abraham Verghese Grove: 736 pages, $32 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

There’s a large whiteboard to the side of Abraham Verghese , acclaimed author and, by day, professor at Stanford University School of Medicine . He swivels in his chair to point to it over Zoom. This is where the cast of his new novel, “ The Covenant of Water ,” took shape — where he jotted down notes and drew sketches of characters including Big Ammachi, the book’s matriarch, whom we first meet as a 12-year-old bride in South India; her son, Philipose, who chronicles the lives of local villagers in newspaper columns signed “The Ordinary Man”; his wife, Elsie, an artist of transcendent gifts; and their daughter, Mariamma, an aspiring physician.

Yet as the novel grew in scope — it spans seven decades, from 1900 to the 1970s, and more than 700 pages — Verghese found himself constantly reworking things. “It’s not as though I’m without a plan — I have a plan,” he insists. “But what happens is over time the characters pretty much dictate that the plan I had just wasn’t going to work for them. So I’d take a photograph of the whiteboard, erase it, and start again.”

One imagines that Verghese’s long-awaited followup to his 2009 bestseller, “ Cutting for Stone ,” involved a lot of scribbling and scrubbing: It’s an immense, immersive work, brimming with interconnected story lines that meander and converge like great river tributaries.

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It is the story of three generations of one family in the Christian community of Parambil, along the Malabar Coast of South India, a “child’s fantasy world of rivulets and canals” that has “spawned a people — Malayalis — as mobile as the liquid medium around them.” The novel encompasses intense passion and tragedy, as well as a medical mystery: The family suffers from an illness, or curse, which they call the “Condition,” that has caused death by drowning in every generation.

Did Verghese know just how vast an undertaking the book would become? “No, I didn’t,” he says with a shrug. “I think I always had the ambition to write a big book; I enjoy reading big books. There’s nothing else I know that can stop time as effectively as getting lost in a big novel.”

For inspiration, Verghese, 67, drew heavily on his mother’s drawings and stories of growing up in the region. “The Covenant of Water” captures this world as it moves, haltingly, through the 20th century — exploring themes of political upheaval, progress and privilege, death and disease along the way. Her tales, he says, were “so rich that I thought, if I’m looking for a landscape, a geography — and I always felt that geography is like a character in any book — then here was one that I knew well.”

He has known many landscapes. His parents, members of the St. Thomas Christian community of Kerala , were hired by Emperor Haile Selassie to teach in Ethiopia, where Verghese was raised. Most summers, he would return to his grandparents’ village in India. His memories, he says, “are still tinged with the lamplight of that era” before electricity.

He began his medical training in Ethiopia, but civil war intervened and Verghese came to the U.S. to work as a nurse’s assistant. He eventually finished his coursework in Madras (where Mariamma studies in the novel). Both experiences, he says, instilled in him an appreciation of “the bedside and the body as opposed to the technological emphasis we’ve slipped into now.”

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Verghese sees a symbiotic relationship between his twin professions, and he brings a similar sensitivity to each. “I’m an internist and by nature we tend to be very attentive to what the body is saying,” he explains. “I feel like I try to bring those qualities to writing. … I resist the notion that it’s two different things. In my mind, I see myself as just this one being, all physician, and I think the lens I bring to the world, whether in the hospital or writing something, is the same lens.”

Though he is an infectious disease specialist by training, Verghese says he spent the COVID pandemic for the most part removed from the front lines of emergency rooms. Yet he watched in horror as other parts of the country were under siege, including his former home of El Paso (the setting of his 1998 memoir, “The Tennis Partner”).

The period also brought back painful memories of the 1980s AIDS crisis, the subject of Verghese’s first book, “ My Own Country : A Doctor’s Story.”

“It was a very intense experience,” he says of the last few years. “Firstly, in the sense that I felt I had already lived through the defining illness of my career — and then something came along that completely eclipsed it. So it was really kind of stunning, with many, many echoes of the AIDS epidemic for me personally.”

Working on “The Covenant of Water” as COVID raged also opened up stark and poignant parallels. “Here I was writing about illness and death in the 1900s, and it just felt to me that nothing had changed in terms of the things we turn to for sustenance in times of great challenge,” he says. “What matters are things like family and loved ones, people who are willing to make sense of your life for you even as it’s slipping away.”

Verghese believes the literature of the pandemic has yet to be written — but it will. “Very much like HIV, I think one has to wait a little bit to digest what happened,” he says. “I’m sure we’ve already seen many, many narratives, but I think we’ll see more quality ones as time goes on.”

Perhaps Verghese will help write that story himself, returning to the mix of reportage and memoir of his earlier books. But for now, he has embraced the broader, freer canvas of make-believe.

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“The great liberation of fiction is that you can do anything you want, but I think you have to work 20 times harder to get the reader’s attention and keep it,” he says. “It’s a different kind of enterprise altogether, but I enjoy it much more than I think I do nonfiction.”

There’s a saying in the novel that Philipose repeats like a mantra: “Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives.” It’s a sentiment that resonates with Verghese, who feels an affinity for Philipose’s workmanlike approach. “I identify with Philipose in a way,” Verghese admits. “There is true genius in the world and there are people, I suppose like me, who just slog at it and in the end you have a product.”

“The Covenant of Water,” of course, is much more than that: It’s an essential, even healing feat of imagination, a whole world to get lost in. May Verghese continue to slog away, wiping clean his whiteboard over and over again.

Tepper has written for the New York Times, Vanity Fair and Air Mail, among other places, and is curator of international literature at City of Asylum in Pittsburgh.

Verghese will discuss “The Covenant of Water” with Aimee Liu at the William Turner Gallery in Santa Monica for a Live Talks Los Angeles event at 8 p.m. May 3 .

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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, 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 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 12-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 40-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.

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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StarTribune

Review: 'the covenant of water,' by abraham verghese.

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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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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A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

More by Kristin Hannah

by Kristin Hannah

BOOK TO SCREEN

by Tana French ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2024

An absorbing crime yarn.

A divorced American detective tries to blend into rural Ireland in this sequel to The Searcher (2020).

In fictional Ardnakelty, on Ireland’s west coast, lives retired American cop Cal Hooper, who busies himself repairing furniture with 15-year-old Theresa “Trey” Reddy and fervently wishes to be boring. Then into town pops Trey’s long-gone, good-for-nothing dad, Johnny, all smiles and charm. Much to her distaste, he says he wants to reclaim his fatherly role. In fact, he’s on the run from a criminal for a debt he can’t repay, and he has a cockamamie scheme to persuade local townsfolk that there might be gold in the nearby mountain with a vein that might run through some of their properties. (What, no leprechauns?) “It’s not sheep shite you’ll be smelling in a few months’ time, man,” he tells a farmer. “It’s champagne and caviar.” Some people have fun fantasizing about sudden riches, but they know better. Johnny’s pursuer, Cillian Rushborough, comes to town, and Johnny tries to convince him he could get rich by purchasing people’s land. Alas, someone bashes Rushborough’s brains in, and now there’s a murder mystery. The plot is a bit of a stretch, but the characters and their relationships work well. Trey detests Johnny for not being in her life, and now that he’s back, she neither wants nor needs him. She gets on much better with Cal. Still, she’s a testy teenager when she thinks someone is not treating her like an adult. Cal is aware of this, and he’s careful how he talks to her. Johnny, not so much: “I swear to fuck, women are only put on this earth to wreck our fuckin’ heads,” he whines about Trey’s mother, briefly forgetting he’s talking to Trey. The book abounds in local color and lively dialogue.

Pub Date: March 5, 2024

ISBN: 9780593493434

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | POLICE PROCEDURALS | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | LITERARY FICTION | SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION

More by Tana French

by Tana French

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Reviews of The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

The Covenant of Water

by Abraham Verghese

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• Historical Fiction
• 20th Century (multiple decades)
• Generational Sagas
• Dealing with Loss
• Asian Authors
• Top 20 Best Books of 2023

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• Reading Guide

Book Summary

Winner: BookBrowse Fiction Award 2023 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, 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 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.

Excerpt The Covenant of Water

1900, Travancore, South India She is twelve years old, and she will be married in the morning. Mother and daughter lie on the mat, their wet cheeks glued together. "The saddest day of a girl's life is the day of her wedding," her mother says. "After that, God willing, it gets better." Soon she hears her mother's sniffles change to steady breathing, then to the softest of snores, which in the girl's mind seem to impose order on the scattered sounds of the night, from the wooden walls exhaling the day's heat to the scuffing sound of the dog in the sandy courtyard outside. A brainfever bird calls out: Kezhekketha? Kezhekketha? Which way is east? Which way is east? She imagines the bird looking down at the clearing where the rectangular thatched roof squats over their house. It sees the lagoon in front and the creek and the paddy field behind. The bird's cry can go on for hours, depriving them of sleep ... but just then it is cut off abruptly, as though a ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• The Covenant of Water begins in South India at the turn of the twentieth century on the eve of an arranged marriage. Initially, the young bride and her much older husband are nameless, while those around them are named. What effect does this create in your introduction to the main characters and how they evolve over time? When the bride is bequeathed the name "Big Ammachi" (p. 64) by her stepson, how does she grow into her title?
• Big Ammachi finds out about "the Condition" that runs through her new family by means of dramatic tragedy, even though her husband and JoJo's aversion to water was evident early on. What impact do the circumstances of "the Condition" have on the decisions each generation makes for their future?
• In what ways ...
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Media Reviews

Reader reviews, bookbrowse review.

Winner: 2023 BookBrowse Fiction Award 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.".. continued

(Reviewed by Peggy Kurkowski ).

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Book Review: Covenant of Water

Librarian andrea nelson recommends the covenant of water by abraham verghese..

Let’s begin by addressing the elephant in the room. Abraham Verghese’s much-anticipated new book, The Covenant of Water, is well over 700 pages long. Libby and Axis 360 offer digital formats, but fair warning: Don’t try to listen while distracted. This book deserves your full attention. From the prologue to the last poignant scene, The Covenant of Water is a literary masterpiece.

The saga begins in 1900. Pledged to marry a 40-year-old widower, a 12-year-old bride-to-be must leave her impoverished mother and travel to a remote farming estate on the Southwest Coast of India. In spite of her fear and loneliness, she learns to cook, keep house, and serve as “Little Ammachi” (little mother) to her husband’s young son. Over time, she becomes “Big Ammachi,” the matriarch of an estate, family, and community she builds, nurtures, and learns to love.

Fast-forward to 1933. Digby, a second major protagonist, flees a tragic childhood in Scotland to study medicine in Madras. His path will cross with Rune, a Swedish physician who leaves his life of wealth and status to renovate an isolated “leper colony” and ease the suffering of India’s most forsaken. A constellation of complex, multi dimensional characters move through each other’s lives, impacting them in ways some will know and others never will.

Himself a practicing physician, author Abraham Verghese’s reverence for the ethical practice of medicine influences each storyline, ultimately stitching them together. But it is motherhood, not medicine, that proves the dominant theme. The book begins and ends with mother-child relationships, paying homage to the quiet brilliance of women navigating a culture of oppression. Verghese’s searing, near-poetic prose captures not only the heavy weight women carry when misguided cultural norms and traditions deprive them of personal choice and opportunity, it illustrates the cost to family and society.

As much as anything else, The Covenant of Water is a tribute to the resilience of women, past and present, who have worked slowly and methodically to take down walls for future generations.

It is also a story of men, both strong and weak, and of redemption.

Now, let’s address the literal elephant, Damodaron . He appears and retreats from view throughout Big Ammachi’s long life, sticking his huge, gray head into the kitchen window, welcoming new members of the clan with a fragrant branch or gentle nudge, even helping to facilitate an intervention. His role is minor, but significant.  Symbolizing continuity and endurance, the elephant bears witness to all three generations’ joy and pain.

Please be forewarned that this book contains some graphic, truly horrific scenes— some attributable to human weakness and stubborn pride, and some due to a terrible “family condition.” In each generation, someone in Big Ammachi’s husband’s family drowns. All families have secrets. 

Vivid imagery most differentiates The Covenant of Water from other epic novels. Each page offers something to the senses, whether the protagonist is watching a swirling monsoon sky grow dark from the porch of Big Ammachi’s Parambil estate or struggling to adapt to the crowded hustle and bustle of Madras, Verghase’s mastery of imagery immerses us in the experience. We don’t just understand the stark contrast between the leper colony’s beautiful gardens and the disfigured, infection-ravaged patients, we feel the injustice, the pain, and the communal gratitude.

The Covenant of Water is Oprah Winfrey’s current book club choice. It moved America’s favorite literary diva so deeply, she postponed her next book club choice to give people more time to read it. Calling it a “modern masterpiece,” she created a special podcast dedicated to it. For a deeper dive, visit The Covenant of Water Podcast on YouTube.

Find The Covenant of Water in the Library’s collections in print, ebook, eaudiobook, and CD.

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Briefly Noted

Winnie and Nelson , by Jonny Steinberg (Knopf) . Eschewing hagiography, this portrait of the Mandelas’ marriage does justice both to the couple’s political heroism and to the betrayals and the secrets that hounded their union. Nelson emerges as the quieter force, with Winnie essential to his consecration. She could be shockingly cruel, “a monument to the revolution’s underbelly” who would settle personal scores by leveraging “the contagion of violence that besets unstable times,” most notoriously through her “football club,” an assembly of brutal bodyguards. Still, she was a world-class messenger, crucial in bringing Black South Africa’s plight to the international stage. The Mandelas, Steinberg writes, were “throwing themselves into the maelstrom of history, and nobody in a maelstrom is in control of their journey.”

Tomorrow Perhaps the Future , by Sarah Watling (Knopf) . This group portrait examines those people—including Jessica Mitford, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Nancy Cunard, Martha Gellhorn, the war photographer Gerda Taro, and the nurse Salaria Kea—whose commitment to anti-Fascism was galvanized by the Spanish Civil War. Watling deploys a wealth of firsthand testimony and archival materials, not in service of a conventional work of history but in an extended consideration of contemporary concerns: What is the line between solidarity and appropriation in joining the struggles of others? How should writers navigate between objectivity and engagement? “The people in this book were imperfect in their commitment,” she writes. Yet they were prepared to “pick a side anyway.”

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The Covenant of Water , by Abraham Verghese (Grove) . This novel begins in 1900 in southern India, with the arranged marriage of a twelve-year-old girl to a forty-year-old widowed farmer. Big Ammachi, as she comes to be called, has married into a family with a curse: once every generation, a member drowns. 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; for a Swedish doctor who has founded a leprosarium, “medicine is his true priesthood, a ministry of healing the body and the soul of his flock.”

The House Is on Fire , by Rachel Beanland (Simon & Schuster) . The Richmond Theatre fire of 1811 was, at the time, the deadliest disaster in U.S. history, killing seventy-two. This historical novel examines the event and its aftermath through four figures: the stagehand who accidentally starts the fire; a well-to-do widow in a box seat; an enslaved young woman, attending with her mistress but confined to the colored gallery; and a blacksmith, also enslaved, who rushes to the scene and rescues patrons jumping from windows. The bad behavior of the powerful becomes a theme: the theatre company attempts to pin blame on a fabricated slave revolt, and men in the audience trample their wives in making their escape.

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By The New Yorker

By Jay Caspian Kang

Abraham Verghese’s long-awaited ‘The Covenant of Water’ chronicles three generations of an Indian family haunted by a water curse

Abraham Verghese is an amazingly impressive and endearing human being. Born in Ethiopia, the son of Indian parents, Verghese studied medicine in India and did residencies in the United States, attended the Iowa Writers Workshop, and published two acclaimed memoirs. A professor of medicine at Stanford, a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, Verghese comes across as deeply wise, empathetic, and humane in interviews. He is determined to cultivate the human element of medical care and to emphasize caring, healing, and sympathetic attunement of physician to patient.

His new novel, “The Covenant of Water,” comes weighted with breathless superlatives and rhapsodic hype. Four-starred pre-pub reviews! A writer on the level of Chekhov, Rushdie, or Dickens! The long-awaited follow-up to his debut novel, 2009′s “Cutting for Stone,” which sat on the New York Times bestseller list for more than two years! Oh how we want to fall in love with an epic tale of which Verghese declares in his letter to readers: “it has love, faith, family, and medicine in it...And after all, what is medicine but life ++?”

Life ++, for good and ill, is the prescription for this sweeping, intimate yet vast, self-consciously hefty novel. Set mainly on the Malabar Coast of South India, in an area called Kerala, and unfurling over 70 years, 1900 to 1977, “The Covenant of Water” presents three generations of an Indian family. Afflicted by what they call The Condition, which means “a death by drowning every generation,” many family members are hampered and hemmed in by a crippling fear of water.

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We begin with a 12-year-old girl compelled to marry a 40-year-old widower after the death of her father. Her new home is a “landlocked dwelling in a land of water, a house full of mysteries.” She learns to appreciate and love her briskly helpful sister-in-law, her enigmatic yet patient new spouse, her needy, anxious, painfully sweet young stepson, a friendly elephant, and even the spirits that haunt the place. This is the novel’s strongest section, poetically written, tenderly told, and quietly compelling. It ends with a shocking tragedy and a devastating loss that presage the many, many that follow.

The next section takes us briefly to Glasgow and a doctor named Digby and then, after a leap forward of 13 years, back to India. The vulnerable, confused young girl of the novel’s opening section develops into a “competent mother,” an adored wife, and ultimately an indomitable matriarch known as Big Ammachi. Her children and grandchildren develop in surprising ways; her son, Philipose, devours long novels from “Moby-Dick” to “Great Expectations” and becomes an eminent writer.

“The Covenant of Water” is admirable in its ethic, impressive in its research, and interesting in its anecdotes. One learns a good deal about Kerala, about how medicine was practiced and how it evolved, about folklore and rituals, customs and cuisine, geography and the history of modern India. Big Ammachi feels vibrantly alive. But the novel would have benefited from a tighter edit; it feels overstuffed with often exaggerated and contrived incidents. The painstaking descriptions of medical procedures, surgeries, and medical school classes may turn off one set of readers, while the improbable twists of the novel’s pulpy love stories and its overwrought sex scenes (reminiscent of those in “Clan of the Cave Bear” or “The Thorn Birds”) may irritate others. Life++ cuts both ways, as drama and melodrama.

The book’s earnestness, sincerity, and good intentions are both strengths and drawbacks. One longs for some humor or sparkle, some variation in tone or voice, some break from the relentlessly terrible things that befall the novel’s characters. In addition to The Condition, they suffer heart attacks, strokes, and cancer; whooping cough and measles; typhoid and diphtheria; premature labors and agonizing deliveries; various kinds of disability; tragic accidents; maulings and maimings; leprosy; impalements; addiction; famine; bombings and war wounds; horrific injuries from fires; untimely deaths. One cannot help but resort to catalogs of the conditions of suffering — that is how the novel piles them up, like Melville and his pages of “cetology.” If this sounds a bit exhausting, it is.

In the letter to readers that prefaces the novel, Verghese tells us that “The Covenant of Water” is based in part on “a forty-page manuscript, complete with illustrations,” that his mother created for her first granddaughter. Early in the novel proper, the narrative jumps forward to the young bride’s attitude when she “becomes a grandmother, and… her granddaughter...begs for a story about their ancestors.” As she ponders where to begin, the grandmother thinks: “memories are woven from gossamer threads; time eats holes in the fabric, and these she must darn with myth and fable.”

Ultimately it is as private experience transmuted into mythos or magical realist yarn-spinning that “The Covenant of Water” makes its best sense. This is not a novel that feels psychologically realistic or urgently suspenseful. It is languorous and often lyrical, morally ambitious, astutely aware that we are always landlocked from and inundated by one another. But quantity and a peculiarly garish vividness often override the mythic center — one would have to regard the accumulation of almost absurdist eventuality as an accomplishment in itself to believe the story fully justified its impressive scope. That the book comes as close as it does to fulfilling its vision for itself is perhaps the strongest testament to its measure of success.

THE COVENANT OF WATER

By Abraham Verghese

Grove, 736 pages, $32

Priscilla Gilman is a former professor of English literature at Yale University and the author of “ The Anti-Romantic Child: A Memoir of Unexpected Joy ” and “ The Critic’s Daughter .”

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

• About the Book

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, 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 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 12-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 40-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.

Audiobook available, read by Abraham Verghese

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
• Discussion Questions
• Reading Guide (PDF)

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Book Review: The Covenant of Water, Abraham Verghese

15 May 2023

t’s been a little while since I’ve done a book review. Things have been busy and this read was a chunky one which I didn’t want to rush through. I do want to say a quick thank you to my followers who have checked in with me to see when the next one is coming out and I’m sorry I couldn’t have got this out sooner! But as promised, here is the next one for you and what a good one it is… 

THANK YOU TO EMILY BURNS AND BRANDHIVE FOR AN UNPUBLISHED PROOF OF THIS BOOK IN EXCHANGE FOR AN HONEST REVIEW. PLEASE NOTE THAT MY POSTS MAY CONTAIN AFFILIATE LINKS

As a book lover, never did I imagine that I would get the opportunity to review an unpublished version of the anticipated new novel from a New York Times Bestselling author – safe to say I am ecstatic. Picked as Oprah’s Book of the Month, I was keen to see how this shaped up. I’ll be honest, I have not read Cutting For Stone and at over 700 pages, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this novel. 

Abraham Verghese, is an accomplished physician who decided during his career to turn to creative writing. His first novel, Cutting For Stone, was widely acclaimed and hit the New York Times Bestseller list.

Upon opening The Covenant of Water, there is a long and heartfelt note for advanced readers. Already you can begin to see the outpouring of warmth from Verghese which flows throughout this book.

“Most families are bound not just by blood but by secrets.” – Abraham Verghese

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.

Our journey starts with a 12 year old girl who we later come to know as Big Ammachi. We follow her through marriage, children, heartbreak, and happiness as well as the lives of her family and those who enter her life. 

I struggle with the notion of arranged and young marriages. Mostly due to reading fantasy books who heavily paint them in a patriarchal light. However, Verghese writes about this tradition which is one of the back-bones to Indian culture; sympathetically but also matter of factly. Without focusing overly on what could be seen as an uncomfortable topic (particularly for the white western audience), Verghese illustrates the development of these relationships, the emotions at play and the cultural norms, both historic and modern, with grace. Combined with the immersive descriptions of Southern India from 1900 through to 1977, this was by far my favourite storyline of the book. 

Through our Ammachi, we learn about the Condition which affects her new husband’s family. Each generation has a death where the cause is water. The Parambil Estate is surrounded by water with many making their living from it. For our Ammachi, water brings her life. Having grown up surrounded by luscious waterways, she cannot understand her new husbands’ aversion to water. So when she faces a tragic loss to the condition, she begins to see its true grip on her family. 

The family begins to expand with new generations. This story spans 70+ years across these multiple generations, and with this, we encounter plenty of political change. In the early 1900s, India was under British rule where the rumblings of independence began and we begin to see how those within the years before India gained independence, fair with one another. Verghese carefully builds upon the historical elements within this story to help the reader understand these political nuances as well its impact on future generations. 

There are two further storylines within this novel. These belong to the Scottish doctor, Digby Kilgour and the loveable and larger than life Swede, Rune Orqvist. Each character has their own well developed backstory which at times, could have been standalone novels. With an incredible attention to detail, Verghese describes both intimate and medical scenes with equal and exacting clarity. The emotional experiences each character has is deep and torrid yet beautiful and grounding. One of the standout moments for me was Phillipose’s homecoming. Returning from college (for reasons I shall not share because you know… spoilers!), Phillipose experiences a moment where his world rights itself. The emotion Verghese manages to convey is both heart wrenching yet heartwarming. You feel this character’s love, want and utter need to be home. To smell the flowers, feel the dirt beneath his feet and hear the wildlife around him. Something only a few of us ever truly experience.  

The Covenant of Water is broken out into parts with numerous chapters. On the whole, the chapters are short but the parts are large. The parts helped to bring in the new storylines and move the development of the overall story along however, I did find the initial concept quite jarring. The initial chapters of the new storylines were long and you’re deep into the new world before being abruptly switched into another. Despite my initial feelings on this approach, it does become clear that Verghese has taken a surgeon-like approach to this story. I did at times wonder why certain backstories existed other than to provide character context; however, upon reflection it is clear that this is his skill at threading these small details to one another; illustrating yet again the deep and complex human connection. Much like the beloved water; everything soon flows together. 

Many have characterised Verghese as compassionate and determined, both of which are prominent in his prose. His passion for his profession, family and faith are beautifully poetic within this story. From descriptions of Kerala and Parambil to Glasgow’s City streets, the world-building is beautifully done. This is an evocative yet humbling novel which leaves you with a deep understanding of human connection. You’ll need tissues, but you’ll enjoy every moment of it. 

Do you think you’ll be giving this one a try?

Rating: ★★★★/5 stars

As always, happy reading.

FANCY THIS READ? YOU CAN FIND THIS BOOK AT AMAZON | WATERSTONES | BOOKSHOP

Posted By: Hannah · In: Book Reviews , Recommendations

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‘Huck Finn’ Is a Masterpiece. This Retelling Just Might Be, Too.

“James” takes Mark Twain’s classic tale and places the enslaved sidekick, Jim, at its center.

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By Dwight Garner

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JAMES , by Percival Everett

“Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” the critic Lionel Trilling wrote, is “one of the world’s great books and one of the central documents of American culture,” in part because it grows with its readers. Mark Twain’s 1884 novel is a catapulting adventure story when one is 10, but its amplitude is grasped only in adulthood.

Here is a question Trilling did not pick up: What about the 10-year-old Black reader who wishes to be catapulted, too, but is too young to understand that the novel’s language, with its 219 uses of the N-word, derives from Twain’s writerly fidelity to the vernacular speech of the American South in the 1830s or 1840s, when the novel is set? This has long been an implacable and racking issue.

Paul Beatty, in his novel “ The Sellout ” (2015), wrestled with this conundrum. One of his characters decides to read “Huckleberry Finn” aloud to his grandchildren. He does not get far. Then he gets an idea.

Although they are the deepest-thinking, combat-ready 8- and 10-year-olds I know, I knew my babies weren’t ready to comprehend “Huckleberry Finn” on its own merits. That’s why I took the liberty to rewrite Mark Twain’s masterpiece. Where the repugnant “N-word” occurs, I replaced it with “warrior” and the word “slave” with “dark-skinned volunteer.”

Percival Everett’s majestic new novel, “James,” goes several steps further. Everett flips the perspective on the events in “Huckleberry Finn.” He gives us the story as a coolly electric first-person narrative in the voice of Jim, the novel’s enslaved runaway. The pair’s adventures on the raft as it twisted down the Mississippi River were largely, from Huck’s perspective, larks. From Jim’s — excuse me, James’s — point of view, nearly every second is deadly serious. We recall that Jim told Huck, in Twain’s novel, that he was quite done with “adventures.”

Everett’s James is indeed a warrior, of a humane, frazzled and reluctant sort. By the time this novel is finished, he will have killed men and freed fellow slaves and set fire to a particularly dismal plantation. He will be whispered about, a legend. What’s more, Everett has rendered him an ambitious reader, one who instantly grasps, for example, that the Bible is a tool of his oppressors, and who has extended internal dialogues with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire and John Locke, sometimes about slavery. James is literate, and he is taking notes. These notes are costly. Another slave who pilfers a pencil stub for him is lynched for the act.

Because this is a Percival Everett novel, we are not surprised that he tears down and rebuilds a cultural landmark. In addition to his publishing-industry satire “Erasure,” which became the Cord Jefferson film “ American Fiction ,” this prolific writer has issued novels that take on the complicated legacies of historical figures. These include Sidney Poitier, in “I Am Not Sidney Poitier” (2009), which is one of the funniest novels I have ever read, and the prune-faced South Carolina segregationist Strom Thurmond, in “ A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid ” (2004).

Because this is a Percival Everett novel, too, it luxuriates in language. Everett, like Twain, is a master of American argot; he is the code switcher’s code switcher. In “James,” he puts his skills to incandescent use. His narrator runs his every public utterance through what he calls his “slave filter,” to make himself sound ridiculous and gullible, to pacify the truculent white people around him. Here is that practice in action, as James explains to a group of enslaved children in a cabin, including a girl named February, how to survive:

The children said together, “And the better they feel, the safer we are.” “February, translate that.” “Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be.” “Nice.”

And here is James, finding himself in Judge Thatcher’s library:

I had wondered every time I sneaked in there what white people would do to a slave who had learned how to read. What would they do to a slave who had taught the other slaves to read? What would they do to a slave who knew what a hypotenuse was, what irony meant, how retribution was spelled?

What sets “James” above Everett’s previous novels, as casually and caustically funny as many are, is that here the humanity is turned up — way up. This is Everett’s most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful. Beneath the wordplay, and below the packed dirt floor of Everett’s moral sensibility, James is an intensely imagined human being. Ta-Nehisi Coates, in “ Between the World and Me ” (2015), wrote that slavery is not “an indefinable mass of flesh” but “a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own.” Everett more than lives up to that prescription.

He is not scoring easy points. He is evoking and critiquing the American experiment, circa the middle of the 19th century, from a wised-up slave’s point of view. Huck talked a lot about feeling lonesome in Twain’s novel. Everett’s James, at certain moments, seems like the loneliest man who ever lived.

Everett mostly sticks to the broad outlines of Twain’s novel. He is riding the same currents; the book flows inexorably, like a river, yet its short chapters keep the movement swift. James is on the run, of course, because he has learned that Miss Watson plans to sell him to a man in New Orleans. He will be separated from his wife and children. Huck is on the run because he has faked his own death after being beaten by his father. They find each other on an island in the Mississippi, and their flight begins. The reader slowly discovers that their bonds run deeper than friendship.

There are familiar large scenes, like Huck and James’s separation in a fog, and their encounter with the deadly con artists, the Duke and the King. But smaller moments are reproduced as well, such as James’s suffering after a rattlesnake bite and Huck’s need to dress like a girl to disguise his identity.

Other scenes drop out, and Everett shifts the setting forward two decades or so, so that we glimpse Union soldiers marching south. New scenes are inserted. I will mention only one, because it is so extraordinary and so deft. At one point James is bought by the Virginia Minstrels, a blackface singing troupe. (They really existed; Twain was a fan.) They need a new tenor, and they’ve heard him singing for his brutal new owner. Because no Black man can appear on a stage, James must himself put on blackface. The moment is ludicrous and terrifying. The troupe includes 10 white men in blackface, “one Black man passing for white and painted black, and me, a light-brown Black man painted black in such a way as to appear like a white man trying to pass for Black.”

In these scenes, Everett makes potent use of the era’s songbook. He also delivers this unforgettable moment, when James in disguise is allowed, for the first time, to stare into the eyes of his oppressors:

White people came out and lined the street, smiling and laughing and clapping. I made eye contact with a couple of people in the crowd and the way they looked at me was different from any contact I had ever had with white people. They were open to me, but what I saw, looking into them, was hardly impressive. They sought to share this moment of mocking me, mocking darkies , laughing at the poor slaves, with joyful, spirited clapping and stomping.

My idea of hell would be to live with a library that contained only reimaginings of famous novels. It’s a wet-brained and dutiful genre, by and large. Or the results are brittle spoofs — to use a word that, according to John Barth, sounds like imperfectly suppressed flatulence — that read as if there are giant scare quotes surrounding the action. Two writers in a hundred walk away unscathed.

“James” is the rarest of exceptions. It should come bundled with Twain’s novel. It is a tangled and subversive homage, a labor of rough love. “His humor and humanity affected me long before I became a writer,” Everett writes of Twain in his acknowledgments. “Heaven for the climate; hell for my long-awaited lunch with Mark Twain.”

Everett does not reprint the famous warning that greets the reader at the start of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” Motives, morals and plot are here in abundance, of course. And Everett shoots what is certain to be this book’s legion of readers straight through the heart.

JAMES | By Percival Everett | Doubleday | 303 pp. | $28

Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade. More about Dwight Garner

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