Showing results for "Water for Life" in Literary Fiction

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala’s long-existing Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time.

"The Water of Life" is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm, tale number 97. A king was dying. An old man told his sons that the water of life would save him. Each one set out in turn. The two older ones, setting out in hopes of being the heir, were rude to a dwarf on the way and became trapped in ravines. When the youngest son went the dwarf asked where he was going, and he told him. The dwarf told him it was in a castle, and gave him an iron wand to open the gates and two loaves to feed to the lions inside.

After receiving an anonymous death threatening note, the aged owner of a Scottish whiskey distillery reaches out to Holmes and Watson. Both of them travel to the Highlands to get to the bottom of the matter and stop the perpetrator.

Willy Cherrymill and his stepdaughter, Lacey, are deeply bruised by a past brimming with unanswered questions. It’s been 30 years since May DuBerry, Willy’s young wife and Lacey’s mother, abandoned them both, leaving Willy to raise Lacey alone. Lacey Cherrymill is smart, stubborn, and focused. She’s also single mother to a young daughter recently diagnosed with a devastating illness. The last thing she needs to think about right now is the betrayal that rocked her childhood. Reluctantly, she has returned to her rural beginnings, a former dairy farm in the Maryland countryside.

When Fan's mum Agnes announces that the family is moving to Western Australia to take care of Agnes's father—a man they've never spoken of before now—Fan finds herself a stranger in a new town, living in a home whose currents and tensions she cannot read or understand. Resentful of her mother's decision to move, Fan forms an alliance with her grandfather, Edwin Salt, a convict transported to Australia in 1861. As she listens to memories of his former life in England, Fan starts snooping around the house, riffling through Edwin's belongings.

“Wolfson’s writing is superb.” —The Washington Post A novel about mothers and daughters, about taking chances, about exploding secrets and testing the boundaries of family Years ago, during a certain summer in Maine, two young women, unaware of each other, met a charismatic man at a...