AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB SELECTION '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 Spanning the years
1900 to 1977 The Covenant of Water follows a family in southern India 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 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 poignant beginning the young girl and future matriarch - known as Big Ammachi
- will witness unthinkable changes at home and at large over the span of her extraordinary life
full of the joys and trials of love and the struggles of hardship. A shimmering evocation of a
lost 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 hardships undergone by
past generations for the sake of those alive today. Imbued with humour deep emotion and the
essence of life it is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.
