Staff Reviews

The best books make our own lives recede, vanish completely, as we fall into the lives of others—until, in the end, our lives are illuminated in vivid and unforgettable flashes. The Covenant of Water does exactly that, immersing us in Southern India—in its history, its religions and castes and culture, as well as the lives of one family (and the parallel life of a Scottish doctor) through time and endless complications; the book’s characters fall in and out of love, parent children, harbor secrets, encounter obstacles, and endure pain physical and psychic. The reader is in thrall, page by riveting page, from the time a 12-year-old bride-to-be alights fearfully in Parambil, the new home in which her life will unspool—as wife, as mother, as matriarch—in ways she could never have foretold. Yet if family is the substance of this miracle of a novel so grounded in character, medicine is its spine, the backbone around which the tale is wrapped. Not just the science of medicine, the miracles that it can perform, the mysteries it can solve, but the DUTY of it. The care. This duty of care thrums through every one of the ten parts of this beyond-brilliant book, as does the balm of compassion. The result is a novel that grabs not just our interest, as we race spellbound through the story; not just our minds, each page a revelation into the sweep of history and the fascinating particularity of science; but most of all our hearts. We are so utterly captivated by the whole of it—by its narrative and its characters and the history and landscape it portrays, by the world view it imparts and the empathy that is at its core—that it becomes one with us. This is the best of novels. Perhaps the best ever. Miraculous doesn’t begin to describe it.