Cutting for Stone

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Random House of Canada, Feb 25, 2009 - Fiction - 560 pages
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.

From inside the book

Contents

PROLOGUEThe Coming
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1The Typhoid State Revisited
CHAPTER 2The Missing Finger
CHAPTER 3The Gate of Tears
CHAPTER 4The FiveF Rule
CHAPTER 5Last Moments
CHAPTER 6My Abyssinia
CHAPTER 28The Good Doctor
CHAPTER 29Abu Kassems Slippers
CHAPTER 30Word for Words
CHAPTER 31The Dominion of the Flesh
CHAPTER 32A Time to Sow
CHAPTER 33A Form of Madness
CHAPTER 34A Time to Reap
CHAPTER 35One Fever from Another

CHAPTER 7Fetor Terribilis
CHAPTER 8Missing People
CHAPTER 9Where Duty Lies
CHAPTER 10Dance of Shiva
PART TWO
CHAPTER 11Bedside Language and Bedroom Language
CHAPTER 12Lands End
CHAPTER 13Praise in the Arms of Jesus
CHAPTER 14Knowledge of the Redeemer
CHAPTER 15Crookedness of the Serpent
CHAPTER 16Bride for a Year
PART THREE
CHAPTER 17Tizita
CHAPTER 18Sins of the Father
CHAPTER 19Giving Dogs Their Due
CHAPTER 20Blind Mans Buff
CHAPTER 21Knowing What You Will Hear
CHAPTER 22The School of Suffering
CHAPTER 23The Afterbird and Other Animals
CHAPTER 24Loving the Dying
CHAPTER 25Anger as a Form of Love
CHAPTER 26The Face of Suffering
CHAPTER 27Answering Medicine
CHAPTER 36Prognostic Signs
CHAPTER 37Exodus
PART FOUR
CHAPTER 38Welcome Wagon
CHAPTER 39The Cure for What Ails Thee
CHAPTER 40Salt and Pepper
CHAPTER 41One Knot at a Time
CHAPTER 42Bloodlines
CHAPTER 43Grand Rounds
CHAPTER 44Begin at the Beginning
CHAPTER 45A Matter of Time
CHAPTER 46Room with a View
CHAPTER 47Missing Letters
CHAPTER 48Five Fingers
CHAPTER 49Queens Move
CHAPTER 50Slit the Thew
CHAPTER 51The Devils Choice
CHAPTER 52A Pair of Unpaired Organs
CHAPTER 53She Is Coming
CHAPTER 54Homefires
CHAPTER 55The Afterbird
Acknowledgments
Bibliography

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About the author (2009)

ABRAHAM VERGHESE is the author of NBCC Award finalist My Own Country, New York Times Notable Book The Tennis Partner, and Cutting for Stone, which spent 107 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, was translated into more than twenty languages, and is being adapted for film by Anonymous Content. His most recent novel is New York Times bestseller and Oprah's Book Club pick The Covenant of Water. Verghese was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2016, has received five honorary degrees, and is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He lives and practices medicine in Stanford, California, where he is the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

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