Novel set mainly in KERALA (and MADRAS)

5th April 2024

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese, novel set mainly in Kerala and Madras.

This novel is shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards 2024, Fiction with a Sense of Place.

The book opens in 1900 and spans the first seven decades of the 20th Century. It is a beautiful tome of family and India, Empire and history. It is about familial ties and medical processes and so much more.

As the story opens early in the 20th Century, a young girl is on the way to her wedding ceremony and she and her husband become the stalwart foundation, caring for future generations and propelling the most able into the world. The husband and his side of the family suffer from something that is simply referred to as ‘the condition’, which manifests in an ability to negotiate water, a serious issue, given that Kerala is full of waterways. It is something that seems to be passed down through the generations.

Over in Madras, we meet Digby, who has joined the Indian Medical Service to further his career as a surgeon and a gifted doctor he is too. Throughout the novel there are interesting medical asides, as patients flock through the surgery; the author is a renowned physician himself which offers interesting learning without being didactic. Leprosy is a running theme throughout the novel.

The 6 shortlisted titles for the ESTWA – Fiction with a sense of place

And so we follow these two central threads, as children are born and people die and disappear. Life events rain down upon the characters as they try to make sense of events.

The storytelling and writing are excellent and the ground it covers (at 700+ pages) is epic. There are beautifully drawn people who will pull on your heart-strings as you live alongside them, moving between Parambil and Madras.

I took this with me on a recent trip to India and was delighted to discover that it was not only set in Kerala, but also in Madras (now Chennai), where we started our own travelling adventure. An outing to Mahabalipuram resonated in the novel, as we had just visited a couple of days prior to reading about the place and this kind of experience is really what TripFiction is all about.

I felt that I immersed myself in the sights, sounds and smells of Kerala and then I would turn to my novel and enjoy the sense of footsteps past within the pages of the book, I could imagine the characters actually in situ as I cast my eyes around. It felt like sensory overload and made for a terrific experience all round.

Tina for the TripFiction Team

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