Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

This is one of the most remarkable books I had the privilege to have read. Verghese is a qualified writer draws the reader into the book immediately. The characters are strong, interpersonal conflicts are interesting and realistic, and keep on the novel. Even minor characters are enough so that the reader wants to know more about her life developed. There is humor, sweet, emotional, and great personal triumph over the whole book.This brief summary does not do justice, the style of prose Verghese powerful and remarkable or structure of the first part of the book,

although it comes to the tragedy that turns the life of the mother of twins cost, leads other main characters, the place of their birth parents to be. Darting back and forth between the events in the operating room (as Thomas Stone, of which, what he looks horrified, tried first to save the life of Marie-Joseph Praise the collapse of the skull of the infant, he believes) is not born alive are to return to the daily mundane activities of his fellow doctor, Ghosh (on the run, which he believes to be a hopeless love for Hema) and Hema fight home to disappear his annual leave in India, the reader may find it impossible, the book and do want to read a path to faster and faster to find out to find what happens next. When the twins were born attached through a blood vessel in the head and separated at the last moment by Stone and Hema for their lives, the reader will be, or the feeling every moment spent not the rest of the story is told through the story. And even if you put the finished novel, and his more-than-compelling characters linger in your head ...

Separated at birth, twins raised in Ethiopia, the reign of Emperor Haile Selaisse, Verghese and leads the reader into an ancient world that are new to most readers with all its flavors, colors, scents and sounds. His art offers remarkable that it's never shocking, but always fascinating, and the characters - Indian expatriate doctors raise their two adopted children, born to Indian nun and an American surgeon, with the help of a guard and Eritrea's own daughter - that We know the feeling, as if they were our own family members. Can separate the interface of sex and death, injury and the surgery and what is not - - in the manner of a classic epic, takes his themes Verghese and they stuck around. But these issues - to deal with the search for a writer - do not hide the fact that it is at its core, the story of two brothers, Marion and Shiva - shiva marion or, as Marion, the narrator describes her single-minded unity in their younger years .

Finally, send the political events in Ethiopia, and betrayal Marion family fled to the United States. His odyssey appears to break all those links, but at the time the novel ends, we realize that every step was in fact are Marion, Shiva and her extended family and closer to a resolution of the various rotations. Training as a surgeon at a hospital in the Bronx, where the students are abroad ("the great tradition of the Mayflower had not trickled down to the ZIP code," Marion reflects ironically), meetings, and finally his father's birth in person - with dramatic consequences - and a chance for peace with Thomas Stone, to make Shiva - and himself.

Anyone familiar with Veghese non-fiction (two very compelling memories, my own country: the story of a doctor and tennis partner) knows that he an impeccable stylist. But relatively few non-fiction can also write wonderful fiction, much less to produce this kind of drama complex. Even rarer is a first novel. Even the remarkable coincidences in the last third of the book never felt anything less than pitch-perfect: a tribute to both the carefully constructed conspiracy Verghese and eloquence, pitch-perfect writing.

It is rare for me to stumble on a novel of this caliber, one who creates the kind of characters I've never met before, people who live now, as vivid in my mind that one of the actual individuals that inhabit my world. That it is only the first of many novels Verghese product for us, lucky reader.

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