Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

International Bestseller

A sweeping, emotionally riveting first novel — an enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home.

Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s 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 — their passion for the same woman — 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.

An unforgettable journey into one man’s remarkable life, and an epic story about the power, intimacy, and curious beauty of the work of healing others.

Abraham Verghese, MD, MACP, is Professor and Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor, and Vice Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the School of Medicine at Stanford University. He is also a best-selling author and a physician with a reputation for his focus on healing in an era where technology often overwhelms the human side of medicine. He received the [Heinz Award](http://www.heinzawards.net/pub/rounds/pdf/19th_Heinz_Awards_General_Press_Release.pdf) in 2014 and was awarded the [National Humanities Medal](https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/national-humanities-medals/abraham-verghese), presented by President Barack Obama, in 2015.

Born in Addis Ababa in 1955, the second of three sons of Indian parents recruited by Emperor Haile Selassie to teach in Ethiopia, he grew up near the capital and began his medical training there. When the emperor was deposed, Verghese briefly joined his parents in the United States, working as an orderly, or nursing assistant, in a series of hospitals and nursing homes before completing his medical education in India at Madras Medical College. His experiences of civil unrest and his time as a hospital orderly were to leave a significant mark on his life and work.
After graduation, he left India for a medical residency in the United States and, like many other foreign medical graduates, he found only the less popular hospitals and communities open to him, an experience he described in a 1997 *New Yorker* article, “The Cowpath to America\*.\*”
From Johnson City, Tennessee, where he was an internal medicine resident from 1980 to 1983, he moved to the Northeast for a fellowship at Boston University School of Medicine, working at Boston City Hospital for two years. It was there that he first saw the early signs of the HIV epidemic. Returning to Johnson City as an assistant professor of medicine, he saw a second epidemic—rural AIDS—and his life took a turn for which he was unprepared. Verghese found himself caring for a surprisingly large number of patients with HIV in a small town where all national projections had suggested he would see none, or perhaps one, a year.
This was an era when little could be done against the virus that caused AIDS other than trying to prevent and treat opportunistic infections; Verghese witnessed and was deeply affected by many premature and tragic deaths. He would write later about being humbled by the experience and recognizing that prior to this he had been caught up in the “conceit of cure.” His work in Tennessee taught him the difference between healing and curing. “One can be healed even when there is no cure, by which I mean a coming to terms with the illness, finding some level of peace and acceptance in such a terrible setting; this is something a physician can, if they are lucky, help facilitate.”

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