Abraham Verghese

Abraham Verghese was born in Addis Ababa in 1955 to Indian parents and completed his medical education in India. After training and practising in the United States, he earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is a professor emeritus of medicine at Stanford University, where his public work has emphasized bedside examination and the relationship between doctor and patient.

His fiction and nonfiction repeatedly examine what illness does to patients, families and clinicians. Medical detail is central, but so are questions of duty, belonging, faith and loss. His first book, My Own Country, grew from caring for people with HIV in rural Tennessee. The Tennis Partner explored friendship and addiction, while his first novel, Cutting for Stone, followed twin brothers born at a mission hospital in Ethiopia.

Verghese received the National Humanities Medal at a White House ceremony in 2016. The Covenant of Water, published in 2023, was selected for Oprah’s Book Club and named a notable or best book of the year by several major publications. Set mainly in Kerala from 1900 to 1977, it follows three generations of a Christian family marked by a pattern of drowning deaths.

Start with The Covenant of Water. Its opening journey sends twelve-year-old Big Ammachi by boat toward an arranged marriage, beginning a long family story in which medicine, inheritance and historical change continually meet. It offers the fullest introduction to Verghese’s patient, expansive storytelling.