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The Covenant of Water (Oprah's Book Club)

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.

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Published May 2, 2023

768 pages

Average rating: 8.34

1,356 RATINGS

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Community Reviews

AR74
May 29, 2025
10/10 stars
absolute perfection. beautiful sweeping saga over generations. connected and divided by water. an exquisite read
Marz
May 16, 2025
5/10 stars
A bit long in the tooth
Anonymous
May 08, 2025
8/10 stars
length of novel

This is the great novel.

Negatives: the length of this novel makes it cumbersome to read. Readers will get easily distracted. Author’s voice in audio book is ok. His modulation for female characters is terrible. Three hundred pages is suffice for this novel.
Anonymous
May 04, 2025
8/10 stars
Dragged a little in the middle but when you are covering three generations of material it's a lot!!
Anonymous
May 03, 2025
10/10 stars
The writing is beautiful and the story is expansive and so interesting.

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