Abraham Verghese · 2023 · river

Abraham Verghese's 2023 saga, spanning 1900 to 1977 on South India's Malabar Coast. Three generations of a Kerala family - haunted by a curse in which one member of each drowns - live out love, faith and medicine in the backwaters of Parambil, the colonial city of Madras, and the hills of Travancore, their story joined by a Scottish surgeon who sails from Glasgow into their world.

1. 1
   Glasgow

   Digby Kilgour, a young surgeon from the Glasgow shipyards' hard streets, joins the Indian Medical Service and sails east, one of the currents that will feed into the family's story.

2. 2
   Madras

   The colonial city on the Coromandel coast where Digby serves and where the novel's separate lives begin to converge - a place of hospitals, ambition and the sea that carries people from afar.

3. 3
   Parambil

   The family estate in the Kerala backwaters, a land as much water as earth, where twelve-year-old Big Ammachi arrives by boat to her wedding and becomes the enduring center of three generations.

4. 4
   Travancore

   The forested hills and Western Ghats above the coast, where the threads of medicine, leprosy and a hereditary drowning affliction are drawn together across the decades.