dpfaef
Written on Oct 13, 2013
This is a masterly debut novel, visceral in its power, heartbreaking in its tenderness. Transporting the reader from the 1940s to the present, from a convent in India to a cargo ship bound for the Yemen, from a tiny operating theatre in Ethiopia to a hospital in the Bronx, "Cutting for Stone" is a thrilling epic of conjoined twins, doctors and patients, temptation and redemption, home and exile - and a riveting family story, irresistibly charged with strange happenings, humour and pathos, that grabs you from its harrowing opening and never lets go. Marion and Shiva Stone are twin sons of a secret union between an Indian nun and a British surgeon at 'Missing' 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 brothers 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 tears them apart and forces Marion to flee his homeland. He makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as a surgical intern at an underfunded, overcrowded hospital.
When the past catches up with him, Marion must trust 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. "Cutting for Stone" is both an unforgettable story of lives cut in half and a gripping evocation of the power, intimacy, danger and curious beauty of the ancient art of medicine.
- ISBN10 0701173831
- ISBN13 9780701173838
- Publish Date 2 April 2009 (first published 1 January 2009)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 24 December 2013
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Vintage Publishing
- Imprint Chatto & Windus
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 560
- Language English
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