Cutting for Stone

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

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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.

Additional Content:

• Watch video clips of the author discussing his background, writing, the inspiration for the novel, and his dual careers of writing and medicine.
• Print a free Reading Group Guide
• Read an Excerpt
• View Author Events

Praise for Cutting for Stone

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

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In Conversation with Abraham Verghese

Q: Your previous two books are non-fiction, but you’ve said that you have always thought of
yourself as a fiction writer first. How so?

A: Fiction is truly my first love. To paraphrase Dorothy Allison, fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world really lives. It is why in teaching medical students I use Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych to teach about end-of-life, and Bastard out of Carolina to help students really understand child abuse. A textbook rarely gives them the kind of truth or understanding achieved in the best fiction.

One of my first published short stories was “Lilacs,” in which the protagonist has HIV. Its appearance in The New Yorker in 1991 was a part of what led to my contract to write My Own Country, a memoir of my years of caring for persons with HIV in rural Tennessee. While writing that book I found myself living through an intense personal story of friendship and loss that led to a second non-fiction book, The Tennis Partner. But after that, I passed up on an offer to write a third non-fiction book. I was keen to get back to fiction, to explore that kind of truth.

Read the complete interview.


On Writing Cutting for Stone


On Medicine and Writing



About Abraham Verghese
Abraham Verghese is Professor and Senior Associate Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He was the founding director of the Center for Medical Humanities & Ethics at the University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio, where he is now an adjunct professor. He is the author of My Own Country, a 1994 NBCC Finalist and a Time Best Book of the Year, and The Tennis Partner, a New York Times Notable Book. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has published essays and short stories that have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Granta, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. He lives in Palo Alto, California.
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