There has been much fanfare over the book Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese with just cause. This book runs a big 564 pages and I think I read it in two days. I couldn’t put it down.
It is a sweeping family saga that takes place in both Africa and America and thrills the reader from the first page to the last.
The main characters, twin boys, Marion and Shiva Stone, are born to a beautiful Indian nun and a British surgeon, Thomas Stone. The backdrop is a mission hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia where the boys are connected at birth through a blood vessel in their heads and continue to have an almost supernatural closeness through their lives. Due to their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance, the twins are taken in by loving foster parents who are both doctors and shape the boys’ destinies to become doctors themselves.
With the Ethiopian revolution in the background, the wrongful imprisonment of their foster father, and entanglements with the same woman, the brothers grow increasingly distant until Marion escapes the betrayal of Shiva and flees to America to practice medicine. In America he is almost destroyed by his life-long love but get help from an unlikely source.
This book was riveting and beautifully written. The characters are masterfully developed and I loved the complex relationship between Marion and Shiva. The author is a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University and his knowledge and descriptions of surgery and the medical field which run through the book are fascinating. This is the type of book people talk about and press into their friends and relatives’ hands saying, “you have got to read this!” Cutting For Stone leaves a lasting impression and is a journey well worth taking.