Mariamma, a 12-year-old child bride, marries a 40-year-old widower and becomes the mistress of 500 acres of Parambil. As various historical events of both British and then independent India unfold, we experience them through the loves and losses of a cast of characters that keeps growing like a nodal system with ever-multiplying branches and intersections. Thomas' arrival in India, this story is about the ebbs and flows of lives across three generations from 1900 to the late-1970s. Rao's immortal opening line for his Kanthapura fits Verghese's Covenant too: 'There is no village in India, however mean, that has not a rich sthalapurana, or legendary history, of its own.' And, like Rao's story, Verghese's also opens with a storytelling grandmother.ĭrawing on ancient Malayali Christian communal histories that reach back to 52 A.D. Like the unforgettable rural South Indian worlds those authors bestowed upon us with places like Kanthapura, Kedaram, Khasak, and Malgudi, respectively, Verghese has given us Parambil, a water-filled, near-mythical dreamscape in Kerala.

We would also do well to consider Covenant as part of the Indian novel in English lineage that includes literary greats like Raja Rao, K Nagarajan, O V Vijayan, and R K Narayan. Indeed, the literary feats in The Covenant of Water deserve to be lauded as much as those of such canonical authors. There will also be continued invocations of the likes of Charles Dickens and George Eliot to describe Verghese's ambitious literary scope and realism. Much will be written about Abraham Verghese's multigenerational South Indian novel in the coming months and years.Īs we've seen with Verghese's earlier fiction, there will be frequent references to that other celebrated doctor-writer, Anton Chekhov.

Abraham verghese novels