Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
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Cutting for Stone

4.7

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20,258 ratings


NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of The Covenant of Water: An enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home. • “Filled with mystical scenes and deeply felt characters.... Verghese is something of a magician as a novelist.” —USA Today

Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother’s death 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.

Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles—and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.

This sweeping, emotionally riveting novel that "shows how history and landscape and accidents of birth conspire to create the story of a single life" (Los Angeles Times).

Cutting for Stone is a novel written by Ethiopian-born Indian-American medical doctor and author Abraham Verghese. It is a saga of twin brothers, orphaned by their mother's death at their births and forsaken by their father. The book includes both a deep description of medical procedures and an exploration of the human side of medical practices.

When first published, the novel was on The New York Times Best Seller list for two years and generally received well by critics. With its positive reception, former United States president Barack Obama put it on his summer reading list and the book was optioned for adaptations.

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ISBN-10

9780375714368

ISBN-13

978-0375714368

Print length

667 pages

Language

English

Publisher

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Publication date

January 25, 2010

Dimensions

5.16 x 1.15 x 8.01 inches

Item weight

1.05 pounds


Popular highlights in this book

  • Wasn’t that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted?

    Highlighted by 8,267 Kindle readers

  • As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.

    Highlighted by 8,065 Kindle readers

  • The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.

    Highlighted by 4,466 Kindle readers


Product details

ASIN :

0375714367

File size :

4082 KB

Text-to-speech :

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Editorial reviews

ONE OF THE ATLANTIC'S 15 BOOKS YOU WON'T REGRET RE-READING

“A winner. . . . Filled with mystical scenes and deeply felt characters. . . . Verghese is something of a magician as a novelist.” —USA Today

“A masterpiece. . . . Not a word is wasted in this larger-than-life saga. . . . Verghese expertly weaves the threads of numerous story lines into one cohesive opus. The writing is graceful, the characters compassionate and the story full of nuggets of wisdom.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Lush and exotic. . . . The kind [of novel] Richard Russo or Cormac McCarthy might write. . . . Shows how history and landscape and accidents of birth conspire to create the story of a single life. . . . Verghese creates this story so lovingly that it is actually possible to live within it for the brief time one spends with this book. You may never leave the chair.” —Los Angeles Times

“Vivid. . . . Cutting for Stone shines.” —The Washington Post Book World

“Absorbing, exhilarating. . . . If you’re hungry for an epic . . . open the covers of Cutting for Stone, [then] don’t expect to do much else.” —The Seattle Times

“Wildly imaginative. . . . Verghese has the rare gift of showing his characters in different lights as the story evolves, from tragedy to comedy to melodrama, with an ending that is part Dickens, part Grey’s Anatomy. The novel works as a family saga, but it is also something more, a lovely ode to the medical profession.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Compelling. . . . Readers will put this novel down at book’s end knowing that it will stick with them for a long time to come.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“The novel is full of compassion and wise vision. . . . I feel I changed forever after reading this book, as if an entire universe had been illuminated for me. It’s an astonishing accomplishment to make such a foreign world familiar to a reader by the book’s end.” —Sandra Cisneros, San Antonio Express-News

“Tremendous. . . . Vivid and thrilling. . . . I feel lucky to have gotten to read it.” —Atul Gawande

“The first novel from physician Verghese displays the virtues so evident in his bestselling and much-lauded memoirs. He has a knack for well-structured scenes, a passion for medicine and a gift for communicating that passion.” —Cleveland Plain-Dealer

“Fantastic. . . . Written with a lyrical flair, told through a compassionate first-person point of view, and rich with medical insight and information, [Cutting for Stone] makes for a memorable read.” —Houston Chronicle

“Vastly entertaining and enlightening.” —Tracy Kidder

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Sample

The Coming

AFTER EIGHT MONTHS spent in the obscurity of our A mother's womb, my brother, Shiva, and I came into the world in the late afternoon of the twentieth of September in the year of grace 1954. We took our first breaths at an elevation of eight thousand feet in the thin air of Addis Ababa, capital city of Ethiopia.

The miracle of our birth took place in Missing Hospital's Operating Theater 3, the very room where our mother, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, spent most of her working hours, and in which she had been most fulfilled.

When our mother, a nun of the Diocesan Carmelite Order of Madras, unexpectedly went into labor that September morning, the big rain in Ethiopia had ended, its rattle on the corrugated tin roofs of Missing ceasing abruptly like a chatterbox cut off in mid-sentence. Overnight, in that hushed silence, the meskel flowers bloomed, turning the hillsides of Addis Ababa into gold. In the meadows around Missing the sedge won its battle over mud, and a brilliant carpet now swept right up to the paved threshold of the hospital, holding forth the promise of something more substantial than cricket, croquet, or shuttlecock. Missing sat on a verdant rise, the irregular cluster of whitewashed one- and two-story buildings looking as if they were pushed up from the ground in the same geologic rumble that created the Entoto Mountains. Troughlike flower beds, fed by the runoff from the roof gutters, surrounded the squat buildings like a moat. Matron Hirst's roses overtook the walls, the crimson blooms framing every window and reaching to the roof. So fertile was that loamy soil that Matron-Missing Hospital's wise and sensible leader-cautioned us against stepping into it barefoot lest we sprout new toes.

Five trails flanked by shoulder-high bushes ran away from the main hospital buildings like spokes of a wheel, leading to five thatched-roof bungalows that were all but hidden by copse, by hedgerows, by wild eucalyptus and pine. It was Matron's intent that Missing resemble an arboretum, or a corner of Kensington Gardens (where, before she came to Africa, she used to walk as a young nun), or Eden before the Fall. Missing was really Mission Hospital, a word that on the Ethiopian tongue came out with a hiss so it sounded like "Miss-ing." A clerk in the Ministry of Health who was a fresh high-school graduate had typed out THE MISSING HOSPITAL on the license, a phonetically correct spelling as far as he was concerned. A reporter for the Ethiopian Herald perpetuated this misspelling. When Matron Hirst had approached the clerk in the ministry to correct this, he pulled out his original typescript. "See for yourself, madam. Quod erat demonstrandum it is Missing," he said, as if he'd proved Pythagoras's theorem, the sun's central position in the solar system, the roundness of the earth, and Missing's precise location at its imagined corner. And so Missing it was.

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About the authors

Abraham Verghese

Abraham Verghese

ABRAHAM VERGHESE is the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor and Vice Chair of Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine. He sees patients, teaches students, and writes.

From 1990 to 1991, Abraham Verghese attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop at The University of Iowa, where he obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree.

His first book, MY OWN COUNTRY, about AIDS in rural Tennessee, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1994 and was made into a movie directed by Mira Nair and starring Naveen Andrews, Marisa Tomei, Glenne Headley and others.

His second book, THE TENNIS PARTNER, was a New York Times notable book and a national bestseller.

His third book, CUTTING FOR STONE was an epic love story, medical story and family saga. It appeared in hardback in 2009, and is in its 9th printing and is being translated into 16 languages. It is a Vintage paperback and was on the New York Times bestseller list for over 110 weeks at this writing.

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Reviews

Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5

20,258 global ratings

James Barton Phelps

James Barton Phelps

5

Emotional story well told with great characters

Reviewed in the United States on August 13, 2010

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This is a long emotional beautifully written novel with characters you can't forget. It's beautifully plotted - well, maybe too well plotted because the ending is almost potboiler gooey - and the action takes place in two hospitals in two countries - Missing (for Mission) in Addis Ababa and Our Lady of Perpetual Help in the ghetto of New York City. It's written by an Indian doctor who was raised in Ethiopia, schooled in Madras, turned internist and academician in the US then turned writer out of the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa and is now a tenured Professor of The Theory and Practice of Medicine at Stanford'

If I were to sum up my reaction to this book I would just say that it's a novel with good people in it - and that's a relief these days; it's a novel all the more interesting to us because of the colorful back-drop of Ethiopia in the first two thirds of the book; it's a novel with a bit too much surgical detail for me - a lot of OR description - and I still don't know whether the operating surgeon stands on the right or the left of the table. (What do you with a left-handed surgeon?) And it's a novel, which presents us with the problems of a foreign doctor, (particularly one with a dark skin) entering practice in America: Are they entitled to compete on the same level for the same choice residencies at the same choice hospitals as our domestic graduates? Coming from a different culture can they apply what they have learned medically with the same sensitivity and skill as a graduate of, say, the University of Kansas Medical School?

I'll review it by telling you about the characters because in the end it's mostly about people. No big moral or political issues Sisteer Mary Joseph Praise - a Carmel;ite nun from India posted to Missing Hospital. It's 1954. Working there as assistant to Thomas Stone. Very religious.. Becomes pregnant byh one time incident with Stone. Conceals the pregnancy under her sari and when found delivering identical twins is rushed to operating room and dies in complicated delivery by Stone.

Thomas Stone - a young. brilliant, Indian trained English surgeon who is so overwrought with the death of the woman he loved because of his bumbling delivery of his twins he rushes form the operating room and is not seen again on the pages of this book - or anywhere else for that matter - till thirty years later when he appears in the operating room of Our Lady hospital in New York as his son Marion is assisting another surgeon in a complicated liver repair. He's now the leading liver surgeon in the world and practicing in a Mayflower hospital in Boston.

Thomas Stone, - Young and brilliant English surgeon. Raised in and trained in India. Father of the twins. Becomes so distraught at the botched delivery he vanishes and doesn't come back to the story till thirty years later when he's found to be the leading liver surgeon in the world, practicing in Boston Hospital.

Marion Stone/Shiva Stone. Identical twin conjoined lightly at the top of the head at birth and separated in the delivery room. Some trouble (?) in detaching Shiva's head may have lead to his death thirty years later from an arteriovenous malfunction caused by blood thinner and which flooded his brain and left him brain dead within a mater of hours - in Our Lady Hospital in NYC.

Marion Praise Stone. The other twin and the narrator of this novel from page one to the end at page 651.

Both Marion and Shiva are raised by Ghost and Hema (see below) at the Hospital in Ethiopia. Lovely scenes of Ethiopia. A warm family feeling at the hospital with many retainers and helpers. Both are close in boyhood with Genet (see below) but drift apart over Genet as adolescents. Marion goes to medical school. Shiva goes only part way but is the brighter. Marion becomes a general surgeon and gets an internship at Our Lady in NYC.

Our Lady of Perpetual Help - it's the "Ellis Island" for young doctors from India, Africa. They can't get jobs in the "Mayflower " hospitals. But it's the place to learn because it's in the ghetto and gets the real problem cases twenty-four hours a day. Exhausting. No sleep. But you learn. (Vershage knows because he was one of them,)

Ghosh. One of the loveliest characters in the book. Indian. Internist. Stationed at Missing. As the Sister Mary Joseph Praise tragedy opens the book he is forced to become a surgeon because Thomas Stone has disappeared and the hospital has no one else to turn to. Marries Hema. (See below) Becomes father to the twins for all intents and purposes. A truly loving man and great doctor.

Hema. An Indian trained OB-GYN specialist at Missing who doesn't get into the operating room in time to save the Sister Mary Joseph Praise situation but delivers the twins successfully. Another lovely character andtruly good person. Marries Ghosh. Raises the twins as her own for thirty years as their real mother for all intents and purposes. Otherwise no children of her own.

Genet. Beautiful daughter of Rosina a retainer at Missing. Same age as the twins. The three of them grow up together in Ethiopia at the hospital. All one family. However she's a tragic figure and the deus ex machina of the tragedy which ends this novel.(As a matter of fact she's such a tragic figure that she's grist for an independent novel about her alone.)

To make a very long story really short this is what happens - all told in superb prose:. There is an idyllic period while the three children grow up and go to school together. Marion loves Genet. They go to medical school together but drift apart. Genet is ready for love and allows Shiva to make love to her unbeknownst to Marion. Now it's the old triangle situation except Marion doesn't learn the truth for some time. .Learning that her daughter has been deflowered Rosina forces Genet into female circumcision. Genet flees and becomes one of the Ethiopian rebels. She is one of four who hijack an Ethiopain Airlines plane during the civil war. She's now a refugee and wanted person and all of her friends are suspect and subject to arrest by the secret police. (This is a Communist state.) Of course, one of her friends is or was Marion Stone and they set out to arrest him. He is warned of the pending incarceration and flees; and in one of the great escape chapters gets out of the country and to America to Our lady hospital where the rest of the story takes place - at about page 400. Shiva remains in Ethiopia and is interested in the treatment and prevention of vaginal fistulas in women, so prevalent in a society which has poor obstetrical and genealogical services.

In America Marion completes his internship and his residency and is now, years later, a Board Qualified General Surgeon. He practices at Our Lady still. One day, anxious for Ethiopian food, he's told about the Queen of Sheba restaurant in NYC - best Ethiopian restaurant in America. Goes there. Finds it's run by Tsegue who he has helped in Addis Ababa years before. She reunites with him and tells him Genet is now in NYC. They find each other. Genet has had a rough life. Finally he makes love to her. But he gets Hepatitis B from her and is at death's door..

Now Marion is dying from liver failure but Shiva comes to America and suggests transplanting a portion of his liver into Marion. Should work because of identical twins. But no one has ever done it before. Call in Thomas Stone the greatest liver surgeon in the world and father of his twins. He does it successfully the first ever living donor liver surgery of its kind. Marion recovers. Shiva dies from the brain bleed. In the meantime Genet has died. in prison - dregs etc.

So as the curtain comes down on this drama there are really only three people left alive - Marion, Thomas and Hema who has lost her husband (Ghosh died some years ago) she has lost one of her "children" (Shiva) but she still has Marion. Everyone else we were close to is dead.

But there is more. Remember I told you it was gooey? Now there is peaceful music. Marion goes back to Missing where he remains as the surgeon. Hema is with him. She's interested in Shiva's program for the eradication and/or proper treatment of vaginal fistulas in African women. And now the program is well funded. Thomas Stone is retired with his reputation intact. Our Lady is famous for the first liver operation of it/s kind and all is well at Missing.

Great novel. Great characters. Lots of plot. Long. But worth it. Please read it. You'll like it.

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99 people found this helpful

MJ15

MJ15

5

Dammit! I thought this was a true story!

Reviewed in the United States on March 20, 2024

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I just finished this book last night. It took me 10 months to read. Why?? Because I'm not sure why. After reading the first few intense chapters (no spoilers), I put the book down. Took a break. And realized I had trouble engaging with the characters. Or maybe last summer got in the way. I really can't explain it, but for the next several months, this book sat in my Kindle. I kept thinking about it, wondering what was going to happen next, but other interests got in the way. I read several books in between and 2 weeks ago, finally decided to pick up Cutting for Stone and the story line once again. Surprisingly, it was quite easy to pick up where I left off even after all these months. Suddenly and surprisingly, the characters came to life...in a big way. The story unfolded and was captivating. I had trouble putting the book down.

I woke up early in the morning to read before work. I picked up the book as soon as I was done work, and I read before bed. The writer has a style that is not only beautiful and poetic in it's rhythm, but so descriptive and alluring. I could picture the characters and locations in my mind and I became engrossed. Despite my college education and post-graduate degree, within almost every chapter, I found myself looking up the definitions of many words unfamiliar to me on my Kindle. I love that. I love learning new words as I read books for enjoyment.

Finishing the book at 1am last night, I exhaled a huge sigh and sat in my bed staring into the dark. I wanted more, but the story ended quite perfectly as writers' want them to....with the reader sitting back and thinking to themselves...."What the hell kind of roller coaster ride did I just take??"

I actually thought this was a true story. I know you're laughing, but it doesn't matter. It's ok. Imagine reading a novel so well written that it made me believe that this story actually happened. It was a thrilling experience to enjoy the book in that manner. When I realized I was wrong all along, I admit I was a bit disappointed. But quickly snapped out of it and realized that I wasn't so much disappointed as I was in awe.

Great story. No, outstanding story! Will this ever be made into a movie? If it does, it better be epic. This book is so memorable. I'm so glad I chose to finish reading it, even though it took me 10 months to do so.

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14 people found this helpful

BBbiblio

BBbiblio

5

Engaging tale by a masterful writer

Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2024

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Abraham Verghese is a brilliant writer. His stories are complex, filled with fully described characters who are sympathetic even when their actions seem cruel or unkind. His settings are authentic and the book is full of interesting historical and cultural realities in places often overlooked in the world of fiction. The medical aspects of the story are fascinating and informative. And his writing allows readers to feel they are sitting with Verghese as he speaks directly to them.

This is not an easy read; some of the topics are painful, some of the events tragic. But it is an incredible journey that will leave you better informed, kinder, and more hopeful about humanity. Don't miss this book.

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4 people found this helpful

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