OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • SUBJECT OF A SIX-PART SUPER SOUL PODCAST SERIES HOSTED BY OPRAH WINFREY 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, following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret “One of the 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 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.

Covenant of Water was not a bad book, but it wasn't a great one either. Nonetheless, Verghese had some good stories in this multigenerational tale of a family cursed by an aversion to water. There were parts that most of us really enjoyed reading, notably how the matriarch of the family (Big Ammachi) goes from pre-teen bride to respected grandmother and how her son helps a doctor save a baby from choking to death. There are lots of pretty scenes in the book and Verghese gave us some quite interesting characters that we enjoyed reading about. So why didn't we love it? One issue was that for all the good characters and scenes, there were long stretches with characters we didn't believe or didn't like. Big Ammachi was wonderful; Phillipose was unreadably pathetic. Digby was an incredible depiction of an ex-pat; Lenin was a dumb sketch of a fanatic that made no sense. Another issue was the tone shift. At the heart of the book is an idea of progress, that things that seem cursed can actually be understood and treated. This is most directly depicted in the Condition the main family has around water, which is eventually explained as a neurological disorder, but is also reflected in the depictions of leprosy throughout the novel. This journey made thematic sense, but many of us felt the novel was stronger when the Curse was mystical and felt that it lost something as things became explained. Finally, there were just some bad choices in the plotting. Lenin punching his fist through his mother's womb was dumb, Elsie's romance with Digby felt artificial, and Philipose just didn't hold together as a character between his early determination to adventure and his eventually retreat to the estate. The themes of progress and family were very clear, but also quite thin and so despite the length of the novel, we really didn't have much to talk about. Ultimately, it's not a bad book; it's just not a deep one. Think of it as an elevated beach read -- you'll enjoy the setting and some of the characters you meet along the way, but nothing here is going to blow your mind.