Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Fiction: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

 Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese stayed with me for days after completion, as I savored not only the detail of a childhood spent in a rural Ethiopian village hospital but also savored Verghese's skill in revealing, through the life of Marion Stone, how all the actions of our life resonate throughout our life.  That resonance in itself is a fascinating topic for me, and Cutting for Stone addresses it with great depth as he richly details the character's lives over the course of several decades.

For more detail, consider the summary below from the MORE online library catalog:   Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born to an Indian nun and a British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mothers death in childbirth 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. Yet it will be love, not politics...that will tear them apart and force Marion, fresh out of medical school, to flee his homeland. He makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as an intern at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to him--nearly destroying him--Marion must entrust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.

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