Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor

Booklovers - mark your calendars for the impending arrival of the first novel by a masterful storyteller! Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese will be published in the USA by Knopf in February 3, 2009 and in the UK by Chatto & Windus in April. 

I was fortunate to be given a copy of Cutting For Stone last month and gorged myself on all 534 pages in less than two days.  Since then, I have passed my copy on to two friends (a difficult feat as it took some wrestling to separate the book from the first friend in order to pass it to the second!)

Born in Ethiopia in 1955, of Indian parents who had emigrated to Ethiopia, Abraham Verghese (pronounced vur geez with a hard 'g') attended medical school in Ethiopia but was forced to leave  in 1973 due to the unstable political situation caused by the overthrow of Emperor Haille Selassie. After working as an orderly in various hospitals in the United States, he went to India to complete his medical education.  On returning to the USA in 1980 and completing his internship and residency, he specialized in HIV and AIDS in Johnson City, Tennessee (a period of his life he records in his first memoir My Own Country).  A few years later, in 1999, he wrote a second memoir, The Tennis Partner. 

Cutting For Stone packs in enough themes to fill a dozen books, and so beautifully are the parts woven together that it is nigh impossible to find a single thread out of place.  It's an extraordinary, compassionate and humane read.  To find out more about it and read some early reviews click here.