Along the Malabar Coast of South India in 1900, a 12-year-old girl grieving her father's death sets off to a rambling estate called Parambil to marry a man almost 30 years her senior. Three generations later, her granddaughter and namesake begs her for a story about their ancestors and a genealogy "chock-full of secrets." So begins an unforgettable journey of faith, medicine and love in Abraham Verghese's magisterial novel The Covenant of Water.

Mariamma, the young bride, arrives at the 500-acre Parambil farm missing her mother and uncertain of her future. Finding strength in her faith as a Saint Thomas Christian (see Beyond the Book), she throws herself into her duties as a wife and homemaker. As the years go by and she bears a child, her stepson JoJo calls her Big Ammachi ("Big Little Mother"), and the name sticks. She becomes the matriarch and mainstay of a family with a peculiar ...