Lunch for Libraries - Abraham Verghese
Madison Public Library Foundation's 2025 Lunch for Libraries event will feature Abraham Verghese, M.D. He will appear live at Monona Terrace to discuss his latest novel, The Covenant of Water. Join us for this annual fundraiser on April 29th at 12:00 p.m.
Lunch for Libraries is a paid and ticketed event. You can purchase a ticket here.
An instant New York Times bestseller and an Oprah’s Book Club Pick, The Covenant of Water has sold more than two million copies worldwide. Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, the novel follows three generations of a Christian family in Kerala, South India, that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning.
As the novel opens, a twelve-year-old girl is sent by boat to her wedding, where she meets her husband for the first time. She joins a prosperous household and becomes known as Big Ammachi, the matriarch of an extraordinary family that will endure hardship, celebrate triumph, and witness unthinkable changes over the coming decades. An exquisite modern classic, The Covenant of Water is an unforgettable and stunning epic of love, faith, and medicine.
Lunch for Libraries proceeds fuel year-round author programming of the Wisconsin Book Festival, presented by Madison Public Library in partnership with Madison Public Library Foundation.
In conversation with Rebecca Makkai.
Abraham Verghese
Abraham Verghese is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the author of My Own Country, The Tennis Partner, and Cutting for Stone, which spent 107 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold more than two million copies worldwide. Verghese was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama, has received six honorary degrees, and is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor in the Department of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
Rebecca Makkai
Rebecca Makkai is the author of the New York Times bestselling I Have Some Questions For You as well as four other works of fiction. Her last novel, The Great Believers, one of the New York Times’ Best Books of the 21st Century, was a finalist for both the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and the 2018 National Book Award, and was the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize among other honors. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca teaches graduate fiction writing at Middlebury College, Northwestern University, and the Bennington Writing Seminars, and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.