If you liked
Books like The Covenant of Water
Loved The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese? Here are 10 books with a similar appeal — drawn mostly from literary fiction, ranked by how confidently we'd recommend them next.
10 books · ranked
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1
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store
In 1972, workers digging a water main in Pottstown, Pennsylvania uncover a skeleton that unravels the hidden history of a neighbourhood shared by Black and Jewish communities in the 1930s. McBride's warm, morally complex novel is about the unlikely alliances between the marginalised and what a community of outcasts can offer each other.
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2
The Bee Sting
Four members of an Irish family — father, mother, teenage son, teenage daughter — each give their own account of the crisis tearing their world apart, in chapters that get progressively shorter as the disaster accelerates. Murray's novel is a formally daring, darkly funny account of family collapse, financial catastrophe and the things families never say to each other.
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3
Orbital
Six astronauts orbit Earth every ninety minutes, watching sixteen sunrises a day, as storms and fires rage below and one crew member waits for news of her dying mother. Harvey's Booker Prize-winning novella asks what it means to look at the Earth from outside it — and whether distance creates clarity or only the illusion of it.
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4
Fourth Wing
Violet Sorrengail, trained for the scribe's quiet life, is forced by her commanding-general mother into the brutal dragon riders' college at Basgiath, where cadets die routinely and her physical frailty makes her a target. Yarros's romantasy phenomenon — dragons, deadly trials and an enemies-to-lovers romance — defined the genre's mainstream breakout and sold millions through BookTok.
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5
Prophet Song
In a near-future Ireland rapidly sliding into authoritarianism, Eilish Stack watches as her husband is taken by the secret police, her eldest son joins the resistance, and the state dismantles civil society with bureaucratic precision. Lynch's Booker Prize-winning novel compresses an apocalypse into a family story, its long, breathless sentences enacting the panic of a world coming apart.
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6
Night Watch
In the aftermath of the American Civil War, a mother and daughter arrive at a West Virginia asylum, and the novel moves between their story and the war years that brought them there. Phillips's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is about trauma, memory and the institutions that both housed and concealed the war's psychological wounds.
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7
Brotherless Night
Sashi, a sixteen-year-old in Jaffna in 1981, dreams of becoming a doctor — and watches her brothers, one by one, drawn into the Tamil militant movement as Sri Lanka descends into civil war. Ganeshananthan's novel is about the impossible choices available to women in a community torn apart by violence from every direction — the state, the militants, and the war itself.
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8
Blackouts
A young man visits a dying mentor, Juan Gay, in a strange desert hotel, and the two trade stories — including the suppressed history of a real 1941 study of queer life that Juan has spent years annotating and erasing. Torres's National Book Award-winning novel is formally experimental, blending fiction, history and visual material into a meditation on queer erasure and recovery.
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9
Witch King
Kai, a demon who has been imprisoned and left for dead, wakes to find years have passed and the world he knew has changed — and sets out with his allies to discover who betrayed him and why. Wells's Locus Award-winning standalone fantasy moves between past and present to tell a story of magic, politics and friendship in a richly imagined world built on systems of power that aren't human-centred.
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10
The Eyes and the Impossible
Johannes, a free dog living in a vast urban park, runs faster than any other animal and serves as the Eyes for the park's ancient Bison overlords — observing everything that happens within the park's walls. Eggers's Newbery Medal-winning novel is a fable about freedom, observation and the walls that separate the wild from the managed, narrated by a dog who has never known anything but the park.