Cutting for Stone

In a mission hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, a nun dies giving birth to twin boys. Their father — a brilliant Indian surgeon — has vanished without explanation. The two children, Marion and Shiva Stone, grow up in the only world they know: the hospital, its patients, its dramas, and the extraordinary doctors who raise them as their own.

Spanning five decades and two continents, Cutting for Stone is one of those rare novels that is simultaneously a gripping story and a profound meditation on medicine, family, love, and betrayal. Abraham Verghese — himself one of America’s most celebrated physicians — renders the world of surgery and healing with an authority and sensory richness that no other writer could match, and surrounds it with a family story of extraordinary emotional depth.

When a political crisis forces Marion to flee to New York and the brothers’ fates diverge, the novel’s final act becomes a reckoning with everything that came before — every secret, every sacrifice, every act of love. This is a novel to disappear into completely. One of the most celebrated debut novels of the twenty-first century, and a modern classic of world fiction. Published by Vintage.