An Evening with NYT Best Selling Author Abraham Verghese
Join us for a summer evening with Abraham Verghese, a New York Times Best Selling author, on Monday, July 8th at 7:00 pm. Verghese, renowned for his bestselling book "Cutting for Stone," will be sharing his latest work, "The Covenant of Water." This captivating novel was an instant New York Times bestseller and was selected for Oprah's Book Club and featured in a podcast series hosted by Oprah Winfrey.
The event will include a talk and book signing by the author. Tickets are $35 and include a copy of The Covenant of Water. To purchase tickets, visit:
Tickets are available for $35 (includes a copy of “Covenant of Water”). Admission only tickets are $20 (limited quantity available).
NOTE: Tickets are non-refundable but can be transferred. Also, if you own the book already, we are happy to donate your copy to the Friends of the Newton Free Library.
About The Covenant of Water
“Grand, spectacular, sweeping and utterly absorbing . . . It is a better world for having a book in it that chronicles so many tragedies in a tone that never deviates from hope.”—Andrew Solomon, New York Times Book Review (cover review)
“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
“Over the course of three generations, two seemingly disparate, deeply connected narratives unfold in an ode to India, family, and medical marvels.”—TIME
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.
About Abraham Verghese:
Abraham Verghese is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the author of books including the NBCC Award finalist My Own Country and the New York Times Notable Book The Tennis Partner. His most recent book, Cutting for Stone, spent 107 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold more than 1.5 million copies in the U.S. alone. It was translated into more than twenty languages and is being adapted for film by Anonymous Content. Verghese was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2016, has received five honorary degrees, and is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He lives and practices medicine in Stanford, California where he is the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine. A decade in the making, The Covenant of Water is his first book since Cutting for Stone.