He eventually finished his coursework in Madras (where Mariamma studies in the novel). He began his medical training in Ethiopia, but civil war intervened and Verghese came to the U.S.

His memories, he says, “are still tinged with the lamplight of that era” before electricity. Most summers, he would return to his grandparents’ village in India. Thomas Christian community of Kerala, were hired by Emperor Haile Selassie to teach in Ethiopia, where Verghese was raised. Her tales, he says, were “so rich that I thought, if I’m looking for a landscape, a geography - and I always felt that geography is like a character in any book - then here was one that I knew well.” “The Covenant of Water” captures this world as it moves, haltingly, through the 20th century - exploring themes of political upheaval, progress and privilege, death and disease along the way. One imagines that Verghese’s long-awaited followup to his 2009 bestseller, “ Cutting for Stone,” involved a lot of scribbling and scrubbing: It’s an immense, immersive work, brimming with interconnected story lines that meander and converge like great river tributaries.įor inspiration, Verghese, 67, drew heavily on his mother’s drawings and stories of growing up in the region. So I’d take a photograph of the whiteboard, erase it, and start again.” “But what happens is over time the characters pretty much dictate that the plan I had just wasn’t going to work for them. “It’s not as though I’m without a plan - I have a plan,” he insists. Yet as the novel grew in scope - it spans seven decades, from 1900 to the 1970s, and more than 700 pages - Verghese found himself constantly reworking things. This is where the cast of his new novel, “ The Covenant of Water,” took shape - where he jotted down notes and drew sketches of characters including Big Ammachi, the book’s matriarch, whom we first meet as a 12-year-old bride in South India her son, Philipose, who chronicles the lives of local villagers in newspaper columns signed “The Ordinary Man” his wife, Elsie, an artist of transcendent gifts and their daughter, Mariamma, an aspiring physician. He swivels in his chair to point to it over Zoom.

There’s a large whiteboard to the side of Abraham Verghese, acclaimed author and, by day, professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.

Verghese cutting for stone