The Covenant of Water
Abraham Verghese, 2023
Historical fiction Contemporary fiction
A Kerala family saga where water, faith and medicine bind three generations, and a boy who cannot swim grows up beside a river that shapes them all. A tender, lyrical family saga that moves at a patient pace through three generations, with faith and medicine woven into everyday life.
Feels like tenderness and awe. About family, time and faith.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy multigenerational family stories shaped by place, faith and medical life. The three-generation span and lyrical, patient telling ask you to keep track of many relatives and settle into a slower rhythm.
Why read it
It offers a wide, tender view of how medicine, faith and family carry across generations, and prose that makes time and water feel close.
A page from the book
The water you step into is never only yours.
The water she 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. Abraham Verghese.Abraham Verghese was born in Addis Ababa to Indian parents and trained as a doctor; his novels draw on his medical life and his Kerala roots.
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Questions readers ask
- Is The Covenant of Water for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy multigenerational family stories shaped by place, faith and medical life. The three-generation span and lyrical, patient telling ask you to keep track of many relatives and settle into a slower rhythm.
- What is The Covenant of Water like?
- A tender, lyrical family saga that moves at a patient pace through three generations, with faith and medicine woven into everyday life. Feels like tenderness and awe. About family, time and faith.
- What should I read after The Covenant of Water?
- If you liked The Covenant of Water, try The Red Tent (Anita Diamant), One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez) and The Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan).
A taste of the feed
The moment you realise time isn’t passing but turning in circles.
—Qué quería —murmuró—, el tiempo pasa. —Así es,—dijo Úrsula—, pero no tanto. Al decirlo, tuvo conciencia de estar dando la misma réplica que recibió del coronel Aureliano Buendía en su celda de sentenciado, y una vez más se estremeció con la comprobación de que el tiempo no pasaba, como ella lo acababa de admitir, sino que daba vueltas en redondo.
One Hundred Years of Solitude · Gabriel García Márquez
A place at the table, handed down whether or not you asked.
My father has asked me to be the fourth corner at the Joy Luck Club.
The Joy Luck Club · Amy Tan
Grief has a weight that only shows itself when you stop moving.
As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer’s long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn’t touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn’t stop.
The Poisonwood Bible · Barbara Kingsolver
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