In a book club and starting to plan your reads for next year? Check out our 2025 picks.

Summary and Reviews of Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese

Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese

Cutting For Stone

by Abraham Verghese
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus:
  • Readers' Rating:
  • First Published:
  • Feb 3, 2009, 560 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Jan 2010, 560 pages
  • Reviewed by BookBrowse Book Reviewed by:
    Lucia Silva
  • Genres & Themes
  • Publication Information
  • Rate this book

  • Buy This Book

About This Book

Book Summary

Voted Best Debut Author of 2009 by BookBrowse Subscribers

An unforgettable journey into one man's remarkable life, and an epic story about the power, intimacy, and curious beauty of the work of healing others set in 1960s & 1970s Ethiopia and 1980s America.

Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth 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. Yet it will be love, not politics—their passion for the same woman—that will tear them apart and force Marion, fresh out of medical school, to flee his homeland. He makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as an intern at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to him—nearly destroying him—Marion must entrust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.

An unforgettable journey into one man’s remarkable life, and an epic story about the power, intimacy, and curious beauty of the work of healing others.

The Coming

After eight months spent in the obscurity of our 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 midsentence. Over night, 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 ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
About This Guide

The introduction, discussion questions, and suggested further reading that follow are designed to enhance your group's discussion of Abraham Verghese's acclaimed first novel, Cutting for Stone.


About This Book

An epic novel that spans continents and generations, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, compassion and redemption, exile An epic novel that spans continents and generations, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, compassion and redemption, exile and home that unfolds across five decades in India, Ethiopia, and America.

Narrated by Marion Stone, the story begins even before Marion and his twin brother, Shiva, are born in Addis ...
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!
  • award image

    BookBrowse Awards
    2009

Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

As a bookseller, I live for novels like Cutting for Stone - big, fat, beautiful novels as beguiling and enchanting as babies, as wise and as generous as old sages. They are the bread-and-butter novels I can't wait to sell, the books people talk about all year long, the books they buy for their sisters and fathers, the book they press into the hands of friends with insistent, almost violent exhortations. Read this. You will love it. You HAVE to read this book...continued

Full Review Members Only (538 words)

(Reviewed by Lucia Silva).

Media Reviews

San Francisco Chronicle - Meghan Ward
An epic tale about love, abandonment, betrayal and redemption, Verghese’s first novel is a masterpiece of traditional storytelling. Not a word is wasted in this larger-than-life saga that spans three countries and six decades

The Washington Post Book World - W. Ralph Eubanks
Masterful ... Verghese’s gripping narrative moves over decades and generations from India to Ethiopia to an inner-city hospital in New York, describing the cultural and spiritual pull of these places. . . . Even with its many stories and layers, Cutting for Stone remains clear and concise.

The Houston Chronicle - William Cobb
The novel is a bit of a potboiler, full of minor characters who have significant roles in plot twists, and that fuels in part its excessive length and numerous digressions.

Library Journal - Jim Coan
This novel succeeds on many levels and is recommended for all collections.

Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Lauded for his sensitive memoir My Own Country, Verghese [now] turns his formidable talents to fiction, mining his own life and experiences in a magnificent, sweeping novel that moves from India to Ethiopia to an inner-city hospital in New York City over decades and generations.... Verghese's weaving of the practice of medicine into the narrative is fascinating even as the story bobs and weaves with the power of the best 19th-century novels.

Kirkus Reviews
The ambition is laudable, but too often accounts of operations—a bowel obstruction here, a vasectomy there—overwhelm the narrative. Characterization suffers.

Author Blurb Atul Gawande
Cutting for Stone is a tremendous accomplishment. The writing is vivid and thrilling, and the story completely absorbing, with its pregnant Indian nun, demon-ridden British surgeon, Siamese twins orphaned and severed at birth, and narrative strands stretching across four continents. A tale this wild is perilous, but there is not a false step anywhere. Accomplished non-fiction writers do not necessarily make accomplished novelists, but with Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese has become both. This is a novel sure to receive a great amount of critical attention–and attention from readers, too. I feel lucky to have gotten to read it.

Author Blurb Mark Salzman
Absolutely fantastic! Holy cow, this book should be a huge success. It has everything: nuns, conjoined twins, civil war, and medicine–I was thinking that if Vikram Seth and Oliver Sacks were to collaborate on a four-hour episode of Grey's Anatomy set in Africa, they could only hope to come up with something this moving and entertaining ... A marvelous novel!

Author Blurb Pauline W. Chen, author of Final Exam
A marvelous novel. To read the first page of Cutting for Stone is to fall hopelessly under the spell of a masterful storyteller; and to try to close the book thereafter is to tear oneself away from the most vivid of dreams. Cutting for Stone is a gorgeous epic tale, suffused with unforgettable grace, humanity and compassion. Verghese breathes such life into his characters that there is a poignant familiarity to them, one that lingers and haunts long after the dream is over. Verghese has once again set the bar and re-defined great medical literature–great literature period–for the rest of us.

Author Blurb Tracy Kidder
Abraham Verghese has always written with grace, precision and feeling [but] he’s topped himself with Cutting for Stone . . . . A vastly entertaining and enlightening book.

Reader Reviews

am

releastic literature
The author used the maximum advantage of being a doctor as his writing so vividly describes many of the processes that occur in the hospital- the thought processes in a doctor's mind while making diagnosis especially of a surgeon's mind - and many of...   Read More
Cathryn Conroy

Reading This Book Is the Literary Equivalent of Being Swept Off My Feet!
Oh, this book! Reading it was the literary equivalent of being swept off my feet! Masterfully written by Abraham Verghese, this is the story of identical, conjoined twins Marion and Shiva, born in Ethiopia of a disgraced Roman Catholic nun from ...   Read More
Deb

Amazing and intriguing story
From the first page I was drawn into this fascinating story, its power is its uniqueness, unpredictable story line and its main characters. I vote this my book of the year.
Andrea

One of my favorite books
This book is fantastic!

Write your own review!

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Beyond the Book



The Hippocratic Oath

The title, Cutting for Stone, refers to a line in the Hippocratic Oath, and to the last name of the three main characters, all of them surgeons. As Abraham Verghese quotes it, the line from the Oath reads "I will not cut for stone, even for patients in whom the disease is manifest. I will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners, specialists in this art." While this line refers specifically to surgery for bladder stones (which were quite prevalent in the 4th century BC), it's also a directive against surgery of all kinds. Ancient Greek physicians did not practice surgery, instead referring their patients to trained surgeons. Surgery was then considered a secondary skill, and surgeons were not trained in ...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked Cutting For Stone, try these:

  • The History of a Difficult Child jacket

    The History of a Difficult Child

    by Mihret Sibhat

    Published 2024

    About this book

    A breathtaking, tragicomic debut novel about the indomitable child of a scorned, formerly land-owning family who must grow up in the wake of Ethiopia's socialist revolution

  • The Monk of Mokha jacket

    The Monk of Mokha

    by Dave Eggers

    Published 2019

    About this book

    More by this author

    From the best-selling author of The Circle and What Is the What, a heart-pounding true story that weaves together the history of coffee, the struggles of everyday Yemenis living through civil war and the courageous journey of a young man - a Muslim and a U.S. citizen - following the most American of dreams.

We have 13 read-alikes for Cutting For Stone, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
More books by Abraham Verghese
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: The Puzzle Box
    The Puzzle Box
    by Danielle Trussoni
    During the tumultuous last days of the Tokugawa shogunate, a 17-year-old emperor known as Meiji ...
  • Book Jacket
    Something, Not Nothing
    by Sarah Leavitt
    In 2020, after a lifetime of struggling with increasingly ill health, Sarah Leavitt's partner, ...
  • Book Jacket
    A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens
    by Raul Palma
    Raul Palma's debut novel A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens introduces Hugo Contreras, who came to the ...
  • Book Jacket
    The MANIAC
    by Benjamin Labatut
    The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut is an ambitious work that falls squarely into the category of fiction...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Libby Lost and Found
    by Stephanie Booth

    Libby Lost and Found is a book for people who don't know who they are without the books they love.

Who Said...

Dictators ride to and fro on tigers from which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

H I O the G

and be entered to win..