It’s not surprising that The Covenant of Water is on this week’s ABA Bestseller list for indie bookstores. This is Abraham Verghese’s first novel since his bestselling Cutting for Stone. Cutting for Stone, written in 2008, is a saga of twin brothers, orphaned by their mother's death at their birth and forsaken by their father. As if that is not juicy enough, the boys end up with a family of physicians and the readers are treated to incredibly descriptive depictions of medical procedures.
Now Verghese is regaling us with another family saga about a family that loses one of its members to a drowning every generation. The Covenant of Water is set between 1900 and 1977 spanning three generations on India’s southern coast. For me this is intriguing. I love the realistic but magical or supernatural feeling - that can’t just be a coincidence, right?
I just started reading The Covenant of Water this week, and I am already invested. It kicks off with the wedding of a 12 year old girl in the early part of the century. We will follow her through the years as she watches the world change around her. Verghese is a beautiful writer. He is also a medical doctor, and so like Cutting for Stone, this one deals with medicine and its advances.
-Ang
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