Cutting for Stone

By Abraham Verghese

Book Overview

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).

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375714367
• ISBN13: 9780375714368
• Release Date: January 2010
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 688 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.4" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Changed My Life!

Dr. Verghese is a master of medical fiction! The way he introduces his characters, and the way he draws out their personalities, joys, failures and achievements, is heartbreaking and exhilarating at the same time! You will totally fall in love with Marion, Shiva, Hema, and other characters, laugh with them at their joys, and cry with them in their sorrows. A+++++++++++++++

Captivating, Colossal

You know how some novels just possess you? Grab you by the hair, the head, the heart, the teeth, the gonads? Well, this epic family saga is one of those. It takes a little while--you need to have a little patience as it introduces the numerous main and supporting characters, the place, and the twines of the story. At about page 80, ballast is apparent. You are fastened. Momentum increases and you are completely absorbed...

Best book of 2009?

The plot of this book can be summed up neatly: Cutting for Stone follows the lives of two boys from birth to adulthood. The boys, Marion and Shiva are identical twins orphaned at birth who are raised by a surrogate family and grow up on the grounds of Missing Hospital in Ethiopia. Although they individuate in adolescence, their lives continue to be intertwined and develop along parallel paths. Eventually both men practice...

"We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime."

This brilliant novel revolves around what is broken -- limbs, family ties, trust -- and the process of rebuilding them. It starts with the birth of twin boys to a nursing nun, Sister Mary Praise Joseph, in a small hospital on the outskirts of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; an event which no one had expected: "The everyday miracle of conception had taken place in the one place it should not have: in Sister Mary Praise Joseph's womb."...

Are You Your Brother's Keeper?

Throughout this magnificent novel, this question is answered affirmatively over and over again. Whether your brother is your identical twin, an orphaned child, an unfortunate neighbor, or a stranger, each person deserves to be cared for. Beginning in India, the story progresses to Africa where it remains until the protagonist immigrates to America. Marion, the narrator of this fictional autobiography, is one of a set...