Cutting for Stone
Wachet auf. Wake up. Live your life, every last drop. Then die peacefully.
Why read it
Twin boys are born conjoined at the head to a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a British surgeon in an Addis Ababa mission hospital, their mother dying and their father vanishing in the same hour.
Verghese, himself a physician, tells a sweeping saga of medicine, exile, and brotherhood that spans Ethiopia, India, and America. It follows twins Marion and Shiva through political upheaval, betrayal, and the healing and cutting arts, into a story about love, loyalty, and the meaning of home.
Published in 2009, the debut novel by physician-author Abraham Verghese spent over two years on the New York Times bestseller list. It drew on his own experience of medicine and his Ethiopian-Indian background.
- 01
Medicine as vocation
What awaits is a novel steeped in the craft, ethics, and drama of surgery and healing.
- 02
The bond of twins
Marion and Shiva's fierce, fraught connection drives the emotional core of the book.
- 03
Exile and return
Political turmoil in Ethiopia scatters the family across continents before drawing them back.
- 04
Fathers and sons
The search for the vanished surgeon father shadows the twins into adulthood.
The dramatic, tragic delivery of the twins at Missing Hospital as Sister Mary Joseph Praise dies in childbirth.
The climactic operation in which Marion and Shiva's fates are bound together on the surgical table.
