My rating: 5 of 5 stars
"What defines a family isn't blood but the secrets they share." ~Abraham Verghese
After a long time, I read such a tome of a book that is more than 700 pages long. But I'm glad I did because it was worth it.
This novel is about three generations of a family residing at Parambil, Kerala. The story starts with a twelve-year-old child bride about to marry against her will a forty-year-old widower with a child. I was apprehensive about what would happen to the bride in a forced marriage with a man much older than her. But what unfolds thereafter is a beautiful saga of love. The bride later grows up to be the matriarch of entire Parambil, known to everyone as Big Ammachi. But the family is afflicted by a strange secret, named by the matriarch of the house as "The Condition." Most of the family members are averse to water and in Kerala, where water is everywhere, this aversion gets noticed by people. Many family members have died by drowning. Big Ammachi prays to God to cure the condition or to send someone who can heal it.
There's a parallel story about a boy named Digby Kilgour raised by a poor single mother at faraway Glasgow. The two parallel stories seem disparate at first, but at the end, everything falls into place.
There are a host of characters in the novel, both major and minor. All the characters are believable and some of them make the reader fall in love with them.
Many characters went through terrible loss yet they showed tremendous resilience.
Apart from "The Condition", another terrible secret kept by the family is revealed towards the end of the novel. In spite of the length of the novel, the story proceeds smoothly, keeping the suspense alive.
The author, Abraham Verghese, is a physician and it's very much evident in the novel. The medical jargons are little difficult to understand for non-medicos like me. Apart from this little inconvenience, it's a superb read.
Water has been used both literally and metaphorically by the author. Water that is indifferent to the sufferings of human, yet it links all of them.
A 5-star-rating from my side and strongly recommended for everyone with a love for literary fiction.
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