Heavy Reading
Some people like to read ‘beach books’ in the summer. Others would rather use extra leisure time to tackle longer and more serious books. If you fall into the latter category, you might be interested in the following two books. They are both fiction, but they are far from ‘flights of fancy’, so to say. Take a look–
The Covenant of Water, Abraham Verghese
Remember Abraham Verghese? He wrote Cutting for Stone. The Covenant of Water is the first book he has written since then. According to the New York Times, the book is well worth the wait, as they say. Is it well worth its 736 pages? Maybe you will want to use your summer to find out.
The story spans 77 years, beginning in 1900, following a South Indian family with a strange secret. The ‘secret’ and how that secret shapes the family becomes the center of the book. Weaving medicine into the plot, as he did in Cutting for Stone, Verghese has written a complex but readable book. It’s already on Oprah’s list and will surely be on many others. For more information, go to his website below.
Anne Berest, author of The Postcard
The Postcard , translated from French, is actually part documentary and part autobiographical fiction. It, too, centers around family and the theme of family trauma and how our lives are shaped by the generations of relatives who came before us. The story begins when Berest gets an anonymous postcard with the names of her maternal great-grandparents, who perished in the Holocaust, written on the back of the card. Several years later, Berest decides to search for the sender of the postcard. Thus begins the documentation of the process to uncover the history of her entire family and much, much more.
