Abraham Verghese, MD, MACP, is Professor and Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor, and Vice Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the School of Medicine at Stanford University. He is also a best-selling author and a physician with a reputation for his focus on healing in an era where technology often overwhelms the human side of medicine. The Covenant of Water is the long-awaited new novel by Verghese, the author of Cutting for Stone (published in 2009) that became a literary phenomenon, selling over 1.5 million copies in the United States and remaining on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years.