“One of my all-time favorite books is "Cutting for Stone" by Abraham Verghese so I was

anxious to read his most recent book – "The Covenant of Water".  I was not disappointed. This

is a book about three generations of family that takes place in beautiful, colorful Southwest

India. It is a massive book that addresses big topics including medicine, love, history, and the

power of family. A surgeon by training, Verghese is a wonderful wordsmith who knows how

to tell a compelling story.”

If you read Abraham Verghese’s biography, you can’t help but be captivated by the man and

impressed by his extraordinary journey from birth in Ethiopia to Indian parents to become a

renowned American physician, author, Vice Chair of Education at Stanford University Medical

School, a recipient of the National Humanities Medal awarded by President Barack Obama in

2015, and how his life inspired two elegantly and beautifully written novels -- "Cutting for

Stone", on the New York Times Best Seller List for over two years, and his long-awaited second

novel, "The Covenant of Water" -- both a tribute to family, love and the art of medicine and

surgery.

Newly debuted in 2023, "Covenant of Water" is a stunning, multi-generational, historical epic

born of simple drawings and recollections written in a notebook by the author’s mother about

her life as a young girl in Kerala, a Christian community on India’s Malabar Coast -- and in her

writings Verghese saw a setting, a family, and the beginnings of a story.

Inspired by his mother’s memoir, a tale, over ten years in writing, slowly enfolded about a

twelve-year-old girl from Kerala who, after the death of her father, is forced into an arranged

marriage with a 40-year-old widower and sent by boat to join her intended in a world of

bountiful nature – bottle-green lotus ponds, rivulets and canals, a vast latticework of lakes and

lagoons -- but the young bride’s estate is set far from the shore. “Why?” she wonders – and

learns a peculiar affliction she names “the Condition” has caused death by drowning in every

generation of her husband’s family -- drownings in ditches and shallow waters – that no one can explain.  

Spanning from the year 1900 to 1977, the mystery of the drownings is just one of the numerous

threads running through this magisterial saga – over its course, the young bride, whose life is

the central stream that flows through the landscape of this story, will witness unthinkable

changes – political upheaval, the harsh fatalism of the caste system, India’s modernization,

progress and privilege, disease and death, hardship, and loss – her courage, resilience, faith, and love the only constants.

Written in Verghese’s painterly prose, Covenant of Water is grand, sweeping, immersive, a

heartfelt imagining of a family, their victories, their wounds, their departed, and the ghosts that

linger, A hymn to family, faith, the power of water, and human understanding, Covenant of

Water is considered one of the most masterful, literary works published in recent years. All its

characters are 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.

We are so excited to introduce our newest feature in Stroll I'On. There a quite a few book clubs in I'On and we thought it would be fun for those book clubs to recommend a book they had recently read and very much enjoyed. All we need to make this a success is your book club's participation and it's so easy just email Lori at Thirlbeck@aol.com the title and author of the book and she'll take it from there. We hope you will enjoy this feature and help make it a success in our neighborhood magazine. Thank you, Karen Clements