Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father, an ardent pacifist, and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War", then, at age 50, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. He received a National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2015, and was praised during the White House ceremony for a “range of proficiency” that extends from “his efforts to emphasize empathy in medicine, to his imaginative renderings of the human drama.National Book Critics Circle Award, Fiction, 2005In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Verghese, 67, is an Ethiopian-born physician who has also written two memoirs. “After we hung up I realized that I’d reflexively risen to my feet and stayed that way throughout our long chat.” “My thoughts were racing back through the decade-plus of writing ‘The Covenant of Water,’ during which time my mother died, and Covid had descended on us," he said. Verghese said in a statement that receiving the call from Winfrey, the dream of countless authors, felt like a “miracle.” I couldn’t put the book down until the very last page - it was unputdownable!” Many moments during the read I had to stop and remember to breathe. And I’ve been reading since I was 3,” Winfrey said in a statement. “This is one of the top five books I’ve read in my lifetime.
Verghese's current book is a multigenerational saga set in India from 1900-1977. “The Covenant of Water," published Tuesday, is Verghese's first work of fiction since his million-selling “Cutting for Stone” came out in 2009. NEW YORK - The long-awaited new novel by Abraham Verghese, “The Covenant of Water,” is Oprah Winfrey's latest book club pick.
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