General admission tickets for $5 will go on sale Tuesday, April 18, 12 pm noon and will be available on this webpage. 

New York Times bestseller Abraham Verghese will read from his new novel The Covenant of Water, followed by an on-stage conversation with Houston author and physician Ricardo Nuila. The evening will conclude with a book sale and signing. 

ABRAHAM VERGHESE – a physician, professor, and writer for more than four decades – was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama for “his range of proficiency…from his efforts to emphasize empathy in medicine, to his imaginative renderings of the human drama.” His debut memoir My Own Country, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, is the story of his experience caring for patients during the AIDS epidemic in rural Tennessee. Verghese is also the author of the nonfiction work The Tennis Partner, a New York Times Notable Book, and the novel Cutting for Stone, which sold more than 1.5 million copies and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for more than two years. The New Yorker called Cutting for Stone “beautiful and amazing,” and USA Today described Verghese as “something of a magician as a novelist.”

He joins us to share his highly anticipated novel The Covenant of Water, which follows a Christian family living on South India’s Malabar Coast that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning. A hymn to progress in medicine and human understanding, The Covenant of Water reflects on a lost India and the passage of time. A decade in the making, this is Verghese’s first book since Cutting for Stone. Verghese’s op-eds on the patient-doctor relationship have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Texas Monthly. He was born in Ethiopia and serves as Professor and Senior Associate Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Stanford University.

RICARDO NUILA is an associate professor of medicine, medical ethics, and health policy at Baylor College of Medicine, where he directs the Humanities Expression and Arts Lab program. His book The People’s Hospital is forthcoming in March 2023, and his fiction has appeared in Guernica, New England Review, McSweeney’s, and other literary magazines. He currently serves on the Inprint Advisory Board.