Page Turners: January 2026

Our book club members are busy reading The Covenant Of Water by Abraham Verghese. Many readers will
remember his wonderful Cutting for Stone, a story of complex family dynamics set in Ethiopia and
the United States.
In The Covenant of Water the setting is Kerala, India with a story covering three generations of a
family with a most peculiar trait: one person in each generation dies from drowning! This is a
lengthy work (715 pages) but as we did not assign a book in December we have had two full months to
digest Verghese’s brilliant novel.
I read The Covenant of Water when it first came out in 2023 and look forward to visiting it again. There is so much in this book I cannot begin to describe it,
so in the words of one reviewer: “At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala’s
long- existing Christian community, 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
unforgettable new beginning, the young girl—and future matriarch, known as Big Ammachi—will witness
unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as
hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants … A shimmering evocation of a bygone
India and of the passage of time itself … a hymn to progress in medicine and to human
understanding, and a humbling testament to the difficulties undergone by past generations for the
sake of those alive today. It is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent
years.”
We will certainly be challenged to discuss this book in one session but we will try! For more
information on Page Turners, please contact one of the coordinators: Steve and Ann Morris at
samwrsi@cox.net, Lisa Buchner at lisabuchner47@gmail.com, or myself at fozimec@cox.net. New
members are always welcome.
—Frances Ozimec