Verghese brought a singular perspective to Johnson City: a doctor unique in his abilities an outsider who could talk to people suspicious of local practitioners and a writer who saw that what was happening in this conservative community was both a medical and a spiritual emergency. Of necessity, he became the local AIDS expert, soon besieged by a shocking number of patients, men and women whose stories came to occupy his mind, and even take over his life. But when the local hospital treated its first AIDS patient in the 1980s, a crisis that had once seemed an ?urban problem? arrived in town to stay.Īt the time, Abraham Verghese was a young doctor specializing in infectious diseases at a Johnson City hospital. Nestled in the Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee, the town had always seemed exempt from the anxieties of modern American life.
My Own Country is set in the town of Johnson City, Tennessee. It is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years. All of Verghese’s great gifts are on display in this new work: there are astonishing scenes of medical ingenuity, fantastic moments of humor, a surprising and deeply moving story, and characters imbued with the essence of life.Ī 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. The family is part of a Christian community that traces itself to the time of the apostles, but times are shifting, and the matriarch of this family, known as Big Ammachi-literally “Big Mother”-will witness unthinkable changes at home and at large over the span of her extraordinary life. 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. Published in 2009, Cutting for Stone became a literary phenomenon, selling over 1.5 million copies in the United States alone and remaining on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years.
The Covenant of Water is the long-awaited new novel by Abraham Verghese, the author of Cutting for Stone.
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