Cutting for Stone

I never thought about reading Cutting for Stone (#278) by Abraham Verghese before my book club decided to read it.  Everyone I mentioned it to was uniformly enthusiastic about this book, and after reading it myself, I can understand why.

This hefty novel is told chiefly from the viewpoint of Marion Stone, one of a pair of identical twin boys born to a British doctor and an Indian nun in Ethiopia in the 1950s.  He tells the extraordinary story of his and his brother Shiva's birth in the tiny Missing Hospital in Addis Ababa.  With both parents gone (their mother has not survived the twins' birth, nor their surgeon father the emotional trauma) Marion and Shiva are raised by the rest of the staff at Missing.  Both boys develop an interest in medicine though their approach to it is as different as night from day.  But it is their attraction to their foster sister, Genet, that will cause a rift between Marion and Shiva and disrupt the entire household.   Genet's involvement with the  Eritrean Liberation Movement will force Marion to flee to America.  When he applies for an internship at an underfunded, rundown New York City hospital in a bad neighborhood, he finds his calling.  His interest in trauma surgery leads to a meeting he never expected to have.  The past intrudes on Marion's future when that meeting leads to several others with powerful consequences.

This book does pack a powerful emotional wallop.  I had to reach for the Kleenex several times while reading, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, because it means the characters are real enough to take on a life of their own, and you suffer and rejoice right along with them. 

A caveat: Cutting for Stone was written by a physician.  If you aren't a health care professional yourself, or if you've never taken a class in medical terminology you might want to lay your hands on a medical dictionary, or keep your electronic device nearby as you're reading so you can look up or Google some of the medical terms.  Whoa! Way too much obstetrical detail for me in the first hundred or so pages...