Cutting for Stone
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- $1.99
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of The Covenant of Water: A beautifully written, page-turning family saga of Ethiopia and America, doctors and patients, exile and home. • “Filled with mystical scenes and deeply felt characters.... Verghese is something of a magician as a novelist.” —USA Today
Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution.
Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles—and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.
This sweeping, emotionally riveting novel that "shows how history and landscape and accidents of birth conspire to create the story of a single life" (Los Angeles Times).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lauded for his sensitive memoir (My Own Country) about his time as a doctor in eastern Tennessee at the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the '80s, Verghese turns his formidable talents to fiction, mining his own life and experiences in a magnificent, sweeping novel that moves from India to Ethiopia to an inner-city hospital in New York City over decades and generations. Sister Mary Joseph Praise, a devout young nun, leaves the south Indian state of Kerala in 1947 for a missionary post in Yemen. During the arduous sea voyage, she saves the life of an English doctor bound for Ethiopia, Thomas Stone, who becomes a key player in her destiny when they meet up again at Missing Hospital in Addis Ababa. Seven years later, Sister Praise dies birthing twin boys: Shiva and Marion, the latter narrating his own and his brother's long, dramatic, biblical story set against the backdrop of political turmoil in Ethiopia, the life of the hospital compound in which they grow up and the love story of their adopted parents, both doctors at Missing. The boys become doctors as well and Verghese's weaving of the practice of medicine into the narrative is fascinating even as the story bobs and weaves with the power and coincidences of the best 19th-century novel.
Customer Reviews
Cutting for Stone
There are so many layers and themes to plumb in this intensely poignant and demanding book. Poignant for it's journey with love and loss and demanding for it's medical language and historical themes. Beyond that there is a spiritual journey of a mystical nature that will not disappoint. Cutting for Stone is both original in story and wise in discourse. A book to read more than once for pleasure and new discovery. Put on the top of your list if you ever care for patients in any facility or work with immigrant doctors.
Cutting for Stone
A fabulous book. Well written with sufficient technical detail to make it authentic while still making the story flow. I couldn't put it down.
Cutting for stone
As a surgeon in training this book could not have come to me at a better time. I loved it, teaches u a lot about life and the art of surgery. Great writing, as someone who reads a lot, I can say this is the best book I have ever read!