So I’d take a photograph of the whiteboard, erase it, and start again.” “But what happens is over time the characters pretty much dictate that the plan I had just wasn’t going to work for them. “It’s not as though I’m without a plan - I have a plan,” he insists. Yet as the novel grew in scope - it spans seven decades, from 1900 to the 1970s, and more than 700 pages - Verghese found himself constantly reworking things. This is where the cast of his new novel, “ The Covenant of Water,” took shape - where he jotted down notes and drew sketches of characters including Big Ammachi, the book’s matriarch, whom we first meet as a 12-year-old bride in South India her son, Philipose, who chronicles the lives of local villagers in newspaper columns signed “The Ordinary Man” his wife, Elsie, an artist of transcendent gifts and their daughter, Mariamma, an aspiring physician. He swivels in his chair to point to it over Zoom.

There’s a large whiteboard to the side of Abraham Verghese, acclaimed author and, by day, professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. Winner of the 1944 Retrospective Hugo Award, Conjure Wife is widely celebrated as a modern classic of horror-fantasy and has been adapted for film three times: Burn, Witch Burn (1962), Weird Woman (1944), and Witch’s Brew (1980).If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.

Now, in order to save his wife, Norman must overcome his disbelief and embrace the dark magic he disdains. But the worst is yet to come-when Tansy takes his curse upon herself. At his wit’s end, he begins to worry that a dark presence is exploiting his fear of trucks. Plus he’s become exceedingly accident prone: from shaving to carpet tacks to letter openers, hazards are suddenly everywhere. He’s even passed over for a promotion that had been certain. Then his student secretary accuses him of seducing her.

Norman’s life starts falling apart.įirst, Norman has a disastrous run-in with a former protégé. But Norman, as a man of science, demands she put an end to it. She only wants to protect him from the other spell-casting faculty wives who would stop at nothing to advance their husbands’ careers. A professor discourages his wife’s witchcraft to disastrous ends in this Hugo Award–winning novel-that inspired three films-by the Grand Master of Fantasy.Įthnology professor Norman Saylor is shocked to discover that his wife, Tansy, has been putting his research on “Conjure Magic” into practice.

Conjure wife book