This is a sweeping multi-generational family saga with incredible characters, gorgeous writing, unexpected plot twists, and an intriguing medical mystery.
The author is a physician, and as a retired nurse, I really appreciated the inclusion of strong nurse characters. He knows that experienced nurses guide young physicians every day.
I loved learning about the setting in southern India during the period from 1900 to the 1970s, as the narrative wove back and forth between the different plot lines. I was intrigued trying to figure out how it would all come together in the end, as I knew it would. Yet I was stunned by the ending.
When I finished it (all 700 pages), I felt bereft, missing the characters so much that I started at the beginning and read it all over again.
OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • SUBJECT OF A SIX-PART SUPER SOUL PODCAST SERIES HOSTED BY OPRAH WINFREY
From the New York Times-bestselling author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and magisterial epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala, South India, following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret
“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
The Covenant of Water is the long-awaited new novel by Abraham Verghese, the author of…
I heard of this book from a neighbor, and now I’m telling everyone to read it.
This is a historical fiction set in California, where I live, and it has wonderful, diverse, complex characters. A family saga infused with the landscape of the Eastern Sierras and its water wars, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the WWII internment of Japanese Americans, and gourmet French cuisine.
The book had amazing prose that took my breath away on every page. This novel prompted me to travel to the museum at Manzanar, the former Japanese internment camp, which is well worth visiting.
The story of how this book came to completion is amazing, too: the author had a major stroke when it was almost finished, leaving her daughter to painstakingly help her find her voice again, a process that took six years. Worth every moment I spent immersed in its 500+ pages.
A National Bestseller A New Yorker Best Book of 2022
Fifteen years after the publication of Evidence of Things Unseen, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Marianne Wiggins returns with a "big, bold book" (USA TODAY) destined to be an American classic: a sweeping masterwork set during World War II about the meaning of family and the limitations of the American Dream.
Rockwell "Rocky" Rhodes has spent years fiercely protecting his California ranch from the LA Water Corporation. It is here where he and his beloved wife Lou raised their twins, Sunny and Stryker, and it is here where…
I’ve been a Kingsolver fan for many years – ever since her Poisonwood Bible days – but I confess I’ve been disappointed by her last few books. So, it was such a joy to delve into this novel and know from the first chapter that I would love it.
The voice of the main character, a troubled young boy from rural Appalachia, is captivating from the opening paragraph. I’m usually an old-school hardcopy kind of gal, but I listened to this on audiobook on a long road trip, and the narrator is wonderful.
There are many rich secondary characters with vivid descriptions of the setting, creating a powerful indictment of the forces behind the opioid epidemic in rural America. This sounds depressing, but it’s a story of survival and triumph and uplifting in the end.
Demon's story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking 'like a little blue prizefighter.' For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise.
In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn't an idea, it's as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn't an abstraction, it's neighbours, parents, and friends. 'Family' could mean love, or reluctant foster…
In 1930s Prague, Lena meets Otto, a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, and follows him to Paris to work for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.
When WWII engulfs the continent, Lena gets stuck in Paris with no news from her Jewish family left behind in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.
Otto, meanwhile, has fled to England. When they are finally reunited, their relationship becomes strained as they face anti-refugee sentiment, and Lena finds herself attracted to another man while desperate for news from her family.
Based on the true story of my mother’s escape from the Holocaust, When It’s Over highlights little-known aspects of WWII: the plight of refugees in Britain and the progressive political movement that led to Churchill’s landslide defeat in the 1945 election.
