Cutting for Stone

A colleague-friend recommended Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone to me this spring - Abby, if you're reading - thank you. Cutting for Stone is an epic, sweeping novel that travels from turn of the (twentieth) century India to mid-century Ethiopia and onward to twenty-first century America. It is the story of Marion and Shiva Praise Stone, but more than that it is a story of man's unparalleled ability to make terrible, terrible decisions, most often when blinded by love.

Marion and Shiva are identical twins, bound together, yet simultaneously torn apart. They come of age at the Missing Hospital, shaped by constant presence of medicine in their lives, by the many ways the human body can fail, and death can come. As Ethiopia descends into chaos and war, Missing Hospital becomes their anchor, the place where they can find safety and shelter and home.

Until, of course, the day they can't.

Verghese's prose is beautiful and very often heart-wrenching, with a wisdom that is more than page-deep. "We come unbidden into this life," he writes early in Cutting for Stone, "and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot." He does not mince his words.

Wonderful in too many ways to count, you will most likely need more than one tissue before you finish. But you can't finish if you don't start.