Joan Mackenzie reviews The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

Hello I'm Joan and this book is called The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese and it is without question simply one of the best books that I have read in quite a long time. I adored it. It starts with a 12 year old girl’s tears on the eve of her wedding to a man who’s 40 years old. And in order to get to the wedding she needs to travel some distance up a river knowing that she’ll never see her home again. She goes on to become the matriarch of a large extended family and over three generations, this book is set between the years 1900 and 1977, She oversees a lot of love and loss and death and births and all sorts of things in the extended family. But they have an affliction which is something to do with a curse relating to water and they all try very hard to avoid it which is very difficult because they are surrounded by a lot of it. There’s a second narrative in this book which concerns a young Glaswegian doctor who heads over to Madras in order to try and improve his surgical skills. And he has his own story but like the water that flows through the state in which they live and all the surrounding area, their lives eventually also intersect and make it simply a most magnificent remarkable book. It’s over 750 pages long and when I got to the last page I simply never wanted it to end.