Since I’ve been telling everyone I know to read Abraham Verghese’s new novel, The Covenant of Water, even though it’s over 600 pages long, it might be time to talk it up even more. Like his earlier book, Cutting for Stone, it’s a literary masterpiece, well worth the time and effort to study India, specifically the Malabar Coast, from 1900 to 1977. I kept a bookmark at the rough sketch of India, from the coastal cities to the Western Ghats, the better to follow each character and pinpoint the locations up and down the rivers and hills.

Big Ammachi, the family matriarch, had left her home at 12 to marry a 40-year-old gentle giant of a man up the river. Unfortunately, he carries “the condition” into their family, an aversion to water that results in a drowning in every generation, and it’s not until the story progresses well into the 20th century that one discovers the actual medical cause of this covenant with water. 

That discovery, along with granddaughter Mariamma’s forays into treating Hansen’s Disease with her mentor/unknown father, Digby, leads to a greater understanding of the ancestral tragedies, in which some have been felled even by an innocent rainstorm puddle.

Just as the family elephant plays a crucial and sympathetic role, so too does an animal help solve family issues in Margot Livesey’s The Boy in the Field. Although we are introduced to Matthew, Zoe, and Duncan at the scene of a violent crime, the story is really about an ordinary Oxford family as they grapple with teenage issues and the parents’ marital woes. Lest that put you off, you’ll find that Livesey has a light touch; their adopted dog, Lily, seems to point everyone in the right direction, keeping the family in one piece, with the addition of Duncan’s birth mother and Miranda the new sister.