Cutting for Stone Abraham Verghese; Sunil Malhotra (Read by)

Cutting for Stone

Author: Abraham Verghese and Sunil Malhotra (Read by)

Publisher: Random House Audio Publishing Group

Publication Date: 03 February, 2009

ISBN: 9781415962138

Pages:

Subjects: General

Available as: Trade Paper, 978-0-375-71436-8 Trade Cloth, 978-0-375-41449-7 Audio Recording Downloadable, 978-1-4159-6213-8

Description:

Marion and Shiva Stone, born in a mission hospital in Ethiopia in the 1950s, are twin sons of an illicit union between an Indian nun and British doctor. Bound by birth but with widely different temperaments they grow up together, in a country on the brink of revolution, until a betrayal splits them apart. But fate has not finished with them ż they will be brought together once more, in the sterile surroundings of a hospital theatre.From the 1940s to the present, from a convent in India to a cargo ship bound for the Yemen, from a tiny operating theatre in Ethiopia to a hospital in the Bronx, this is both a richly visceral epic and a riveting family story.

PW Publishers Weekly

Review Source: Publishers Weekly

Review Date: 2008-10-27

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. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved