book review of cutting for stone

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By Erica Wagner

Feb. 6, 2009

“I will not cut for stone,” runs the text of the Hippocratic oath, “even for patients in whom the disease is manifest; I will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners, specialists in this art.”

Those words provide an epigraph partway through Abraham Verghese’s first novel, “Cutting for Stone,” and also explain the surname of its narrator, Marion Stone, along with his twin brother, Shiva, and their father, the almost entirely absent surgeon Thomas Stone. Absent in body only: in spirit, Thomas’s disappearance after their birth haunts and drives this book.

Yet until the reader comes across the oath, well into the novel, the title may seem pleasing to the ear but puzzling to the mind: it tries to do too many jobs at once. It neither suggests the book’s action — as, say, “Digging to America” does — nor evokes its mood, as “Bleak House” does. Still, Verghese strives for the empathy of Anne Tyler and the scope of Dickens. If he doesn’t quite manage either, he is to be admired for his ambition.

Verghese is a physician and an already accomplished author. His two nonfiction books, “My Own Country,” about AIDS in rural Tennessee, and “The Tennis Partner,” a moving and honest memoir of a difficult, intimate friendship, are justly celebrated. His commitment to both his professions is admirable: currently a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, he also holds an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. But why mention qualifications? What do qualifications matter where fine writing is concerned? Not at all, is the correct answer, and yet qualifications like Verghese’s are tribute, at the very least, to his stalwart effort. This effort is both the making and the unmaking of “Cutting for Stone.”

The plot of this big, dense book is fairly straightforward. Marion and Shiva Stone are born one dramatic afternoon in 1954 in Addis Ababa, the same day their mother — a nun, Sister Mary Joseph Praise — dies of complications from her hidden pregnancy. The boys are conjoined at the skull, yet separated at birth; they are raised by Dr. Kalpana Hemlatha, a forceful woman known as Hema, and Dr. Abhi Ghosh, both immigrants from Madras and both doctors at the hospital where the boys’ natural parents also worked. Missing Hospital, it’s called: “Missing was really Mission Hospital, a word that on the Ethiopian tongue came out with a hiss so it sounded like ‘Miss ing .’ ” They grow up amid the political turmoil of Ethiopia (its actual chronology altered slightly by Verghese to suit his fictional purposes), and in 1979 Marion flees, first to Nairobi and finally to New York, where he qualifies as a surgeon. Shiva, too, goes into medicine, specializing in treating vaginal fistula, for which work he is acclaimed in this very newspaper, a sure sign of his renown. Almost supernaturally close as children, the brothers become more and more distant as the novel progresses; they are dramatically reunited at its end — through the mysterious agency of the long-vanished Thomas Stone.

As a novelist, Verghese looks to models like Salman Rushdie and John Irving: the novel is capacious, not to say baggy, in the way those writers’ novels can be, and it is tinged, albeit lightly, with a sense of magic, though one senses that Verghese in his soul is too much a realist ever to be quite convinced of his own attempts in this department. (The brothers’ being joined — but only briefly — at the head is an example of this slightly half-hearted effort.) Much more forceful are his vivid descriptions of surgery, vivid enough that those with weaker stomachs may find them disturbing. One would, I suppose, be ill advised to use this novel as a textbook for liver transplantation or bowel surgery, but it might almost be possible. The trouble is that for all the author’s passion, this kind of writing periodically stops the book in its tracks: “Hema smiled, as if to say, Very little escapes me, my dear man. And then she was thinking of . . . rugaeform folds, of the median raphe that separated one bollock from the other, of the dartos muscle, the cells of Sertoli.” Hema’s mind, as the author then says, is racing: but the reader’s goes into a stall.

The novel is crippled, too, by the use of back story. There is a feeling of Greek drama about the narrative: a lot of the real action happens offstage. We finally learn, toward the end of the novel, what made Thomas Stone the man he is, with all his strengths and deficits, yet by then the tale seems curiously belated and less than fully integrated into the novel. The same is true for the later events in the life of Genet, Marion’s childhood sweetheart, the daughter of his nanny, who joins a band of Eritrean guerrillas but reappears fleetingly in Marion’s life to devastating effect. Verghese’s weakness is the weakness of a writer with too much heart: it’s clear he loves his characters and he just wants to cram in every last fact about them, somehow. Great novels are not built merely on the agglomeration of detail.

This is a first novel that reveals the author’s willingness to show the souls, as well as the bodies, of his characters. In Verghese’s second profession, a great surgeon is called an editor. Here’s hoping that in the future the author finds stronger medicine in that line.

CUTTING FOR STONE

By Abraham Verghese

541 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95

Erica Wagner is the literary editor of The Times of London and the author, most recently, of the novel “Seizure.”

Book Reviews

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese: Book Review

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Cover of Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Twins Marion and Shiva Stone are orphaned when their mother, a nun, dies in childbirth and their father denies them. They are blessed to be taken in and raised by an Indian woman who loves them with every fiber of her being. Cutting for Stone primarily follows Marion as he grows up in Ethiopia and then immigrates to the US.

That’s a pretty weak synopsis, but it’s hard to capture this book in just a few sentences.

It started off just a little slow, which is why I’m only giving it 4.5 stars. I could see the potential for a fantastic story so I kept reading, but the entire first part–131 pages–is technically only one day with a lot of flashbacks and back story thrown in. I started to feel like, at this rate, the twins might be a week old by the time I finished this 658 page book.

But then it picked up and I never looked back. In fact, I sat down to read for just a few minutes while I was eating dinner one night and I finished the last 150 pages of the book. I just could not put it down. I was fully invested in what happened with Marion by then, and that’s about the point where I really and truly started to worry for him.

I liked reading about Addis Ababa and Ethiopia. I hate to admit it, but before reading this, I couldn’t have even told you which country Addis Ababa was located in. I would have taken a guess at somewhere in the Middle East and been completely wrong. And who knew that it’s at an elevation of about 8000 feet and it’s cool and misty? That doesn’t fit my “ We Are the World ” image of Africa. As soon as I finish this review, I have a ton of post-its in my book marking places and facts I want to look up and learn more about. I don’t really do that very often, but I’m obviously ridiculously ignorant about this part of the world.

This is such a big, epic story that it’s hard for me to really say what I think. I hear epic and I tend to think about fantasy books and their pages and pages of characters and relationships, and that’s not the case here. It’s just epic in that it covers only a few characters’ lives but those characters have stories worth telling. They travel around from India to Ethiopia to the US, showing a lot of culture and history along the way.

I love that very few people in this “family” are actually related, but they couldn’t love each other more if they tried. I don’t know why that kind of storyline always resonates with me when I have a big extended family that I love dearly, but it does. I guess I like to think that those who are unfortunate enough to be born into crappy families have the choice to build their own good families.

I did love the characters. They were complicated and felt real to me. My favorite just might have been Ghosh. He’s probably the least complicated, but he has a heart full of love and wisdom, loves a good time, and has a wicked sense of humor. Hema is so fierce that I couldn’t help but love her too. Thomas Stone is a little bit of an enigma throughout the whole thing. I was glad that I finally got some of his background so I could try to understand where he was coming from. The Matron is such a practical nun that I had to respect her as well. I’m not sure how much faith she had after years of struggling to help poor Ethiopians, but she did whatever she had to in order to continue caring for them. I don’t even know what to say about Genell. My feelings about her veered around wildly, so I won’t say anything in order to avoid spoilers. Sister Mary Joseph Praise. She’s not even fully present in the story, but she’s the connection between all these people. They love her, so I had to as well. You get her background pretty early on, and my heart just broke for her.

Then there’s Marion and Shiva. I didn’t understand Shiva, I admit. I don’t know if his traumatic entrance into the world made him the way that he was, but he was just different. He was almost impossible to know and could best be described as amoral. He does what he wants and doesn’t quite seem to understand the point of society’s laws and rules of behavior. I couldn’t blame him for what he was. Marion seemed to get all the heart and the nobility. He tries so hard to do what’s right and respect others. He genuinely wants to help people. I was rooting for him all along.

I highly recommend this book. Stick with it through the first section, and I promise the payoff will be worth it. I can’t wait to discuss this tonight with my book club!

Edit: I wrote this review last week, and we had a great discussion for our first “real” meeting. We all loved it! Ironically, we met at a Jamaican restaurant, where one of the dishes was named after the Ethiopian emperor in the book. I was the nerd who picked up on that little nugget.

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I have this book on my reader and having been meaning to read it for a long time – your review has prompted me to move it up the list. I have been intimidated by the length but it is good to see the story moves despite the length.

I loved this book also. It was hard to get into the first part I agree and a difficult book to sum up for others. I learned much from this story and it made for a great book club discussion. Great review!

I absolutely love Cutting for Stone, but I admit I remember very little except finding it very sad, and the surgical details a little bloody at times. I am glad to hear you enjoyed it 🙂

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Book Thoughts from Bed

A place for book reviews and recommendations.

Book Review: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Cutting for Stone is an elegantly written novel that is both a family epic and a tribute to the art of medicine and surgery.

This post may contain Amazon Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases at no additional cost to you. (This in no way affects the honesty of my reviews!) All commissions will be donated to the ALS Association.

I read Cutting for Stone as part of the 2021 Thoughtful Reading Challenge. June’s challenge was to read a book with twins as characters. Cutting for Stone certainly fit the bill – one of the twins, Marion Stone, even narrated the story.

Let’s begin with a Cutting for Stone summary:

Cutting for Stone begins with what Marion has been able to piece together about his parents. His mother was a nun and nurse at an Ethiopian hospital that would become a home to Marion and his identical twin, Shiva. His father was a brilliant surgeon in the same hospital. I was worried that the circumstances leading to the conception of the babies would be tawdry (a pregnant nun?), but it wasn’t.

In a long, grisly labor room scene, Sister Mary Joseph Praise loses her life and the devastated father of the babies, Thomas Stone, flees, abandoning the boys to be raised by the hospital’s two other doctors, Hema and Ghosh.

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The twins grow up in a loving household, but the family’s harmony is temporarily disrupted by events like political coups, military crack downs, and even the angst of puberty. I thought the political themes of the novel were particularly interesting and illustrated how power can go unchecked in nondemocratic societies and how vulnerable this leaves citizens. It also explains how communism, with its promise of income redistribution, can get a toe hold in so many countries.

As they mature, the once inseparable twins develop their own, unique identities while still maintaining a strong, but battered, bond. Mentoring by their parents and spending a lot of time at the hospital has influenced them to pursue medicine, but in very different ways. “Medicine” was another well-developed theme in Cutting for Stone that I really enjoyed. The author, a doctor himself, obviously has great reverence for medicine and for those who practice it with skill and compassion. The book is populated with decent physicians. It was refreshing. The author also goes into great detail about medical conditions and procedures – I now know more about how livers function than I ever wanted to know!

I also liked the pervasive spiritual theme in the story. Most of the characters believed in a higher power and would pray (sometimes to multiple gods) in times of trouble. The nuns translated their faith into service to the poor. And there were even some incidents depicted as signs from long-departed Ghosh and Sister Mary Joseph Praise. It gave the book a slightly mystical feel.

My only complaint is that, at 690 pages, it’s a bit too long and dragged in a few places. Or maybe I should blame my shrinking attention span.

Overall, I give Cutting for Stone an enthusiastic thumbs up. Strong, likable characters, vivid settings, and positive themes make this an excellent read. Thanks, Laine and Julia, for the recommendation!

Did you read a book with twins as characters this month? Tell us about it!

And if you enjoyed this Cutting for Stone book review, how about pinning it?

And for another perspective on Cutting for Stone, check out this book review on Bob’s Books .

16 thoughts on “ Book Review: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese ”

This was a great read!!!!

Like Liked by 1 person

Definitely agree!

One of my all time favorite books!

You have good taste in books! 😉

Okay, I liked the book. Heck, maybe that’s not even a strong enough word to describe what I thought of it? Nope. It is. Liked not loved is the right description. If it were 150-200 pages shorter, I think it would have loved this book! Now I realize, that probably says a lot more about me than the book. Nevertheless, there were some descriptions and narratives that seemed to go on and on and on. Oh, and at times, I wasn’t sure if I was reading a book or studying for the MCAT. I understand that the author is a doctor/writer and I am duly impressed but for me the common layman, a little less surgical description would have been just fine. The good news is that if in a pinch and I’m called upon to operate on a liver, I’ll break out this book and get started. And the birth of the twins, really no way to condense that down say, oh, I don’t know, to less than 100 pages?! Okay, maybe it wasn’t that long but it sure seemed like it. On the other hand, there were lots of great themes and messages in the book. The characters were fantastic and although there were many, they were easy to keep straight. Also, so many GOOD people in this novel! Despite where they are and the poverty that they live in, they are full of love and compassion for their neighbors. I too, Michelle, enjoyed the political and historical themes that ran throughout the book. Learning about Ethiopia (even how to pronounce it correctly), its people and leaders, and its relationship with Eritrea was quite fascinating and informative. Also, the good of so many characters juxtaposed to the outright evil and malicious characters that kept popping up created a feeling of tension that must exist living in a place where you cannot trust your leadership and government. You mentioned the spiritual theme – while reading this book, I kept thinking of the prodigal son Bible story and the relationship between Marion and Shiva. So see? I did like it. Good choice for this month Michelle!

So glad you liked it! But are you saying you didn’t like the descriptive vasectomy scene? 🙂

Hello, Michelle! This is a book I would never had found without you–and it is now my summer read! Unlike George (lol)–I love some good surgery scenes (I work for J&J on the medical device side). I truly appreciate the perspective of medicine in third-world settings, not only with the clinical adaptations, but the people working in the African “healthcare systems”. It is fascinating to compare aspects of worldwide healthcare, and appreciate both pros and cons of how the US approaches medicine and surgery vs. other countries. Separately–the writing is so vivid, it’s like you’re transported to that place and time, with a 360 degree view and feel of what is happening in each moment. Wow! Thank you for finding this gem!

Hi Robin! I love it when people like the books I recommend! You’re right about the writing – vivid is a great adjective for it. I’m pretty sure this is Abraham Verghese’s first novel, which makes it even more remarkable. Glad you like it, and given the length it just might last you all summer!

One of my all time favorite books and authors. I also loved reading The Tennis Partner and My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story. As an aside, I just found your Blog by reading the Notre Dame Alumni Spotlight in the Echoes Newsletter. I am amazed by your story. I am a 1976 Graduate of Notre Dame from Southern California and just moved to the Brookside area of KCMO last year. So I am your neighbor! I’m reaching out to see if you would like any help or visits or anything. I’ve been involved with the Notre Dame Women’s Alumni Group Book Club for about 18 months and am looking forward to reading your book reviews.

Hi Christine! Nice to meet you! I live in Brookside, too (I can’t remember if I mentioned that in the ND piece). We’re a St. Peter’s family. A good friend of mine (also Brookside / St. Peter’s) might have been in your class at Notre Dame. I’ll email you when I figure it out. Anyway, welcome to the neighborhood!

And thanks for the book recommendations. I’ll definitely check them out. Plus, I’m going to see what the alumni group is reading these days.

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Kelly – I do my own reviews of books I read, and found yours, and offer a link to it at the conclusion of mine. Our reviews are pretty much in harmony. Thank you. Mine is at bobsbeenreading.wordpress.com

Appreciate the linkback! Although my name isn’t Kelly Pettyjohn. Maybe just refer to me as Michelle from Book Thoughts from Bed. I’ll add a link to your post, as well.

Thanks so much! I just finished the Covenant of Water and will definitely read this one.

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Review: Cutting for Stone

Book by ABRAHAM VERGHESE Reviewed by MANISHA SHARMA

Cutting for Stone , Abraham Verghese’s debut novel, is nothing less than an epic in prose. The long narrative, setting, characters, conflicts, and quotations that read as invocations all set out to prove this. It begins with the lines from Gitanjali , the celebrated poetry collection of the Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore:

And because I love this life I know I shall love death as well. The child cries out when From the right breast the mother Takes it away, in the very next moment To find in the left one Its consolation.

Marion and Shiva Stone are separated from their parents right after they are born, conjoined twins in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on September 20, 1954. The complications of a secret pregnancy kill their mother, Sister Marie Joseph Praise. Why Dr. Thomas Stone abandons his sons and where he flees to, we find out later, but essentially, he leaves his sons orphaned.Dr. Hemlatha (Hema), and Dr. Abhi Ghosh, migrants from Madras, India, and doctors at the hospital in Addis Ababa decide to raise the newborns. Marion narrates the story that takes place over five decades, the story of the twin brothers, his own life, and that of his birth parents, who had arrived in Addis Ababa in 1947 to treat the epidemic of typhus. Like Hema and Ghosh, they too were migrants from Madras, now Chennai, India, and came to work at Mission Hospital, pronounced “Missing” by Ethiopians. While Marion, Shiva, Ghosh, and Hema are center stage, Sister Marie Joseph Praise’s story runs below the surface, simmering, reminding the reader of Thomas Stone constantly, until he reappears as if by magic in the last few pages of the novel.

A personal odyssey makes Cutting for Stone something of a bildungsroman, as many critics have noted. Marion comes of age as Ethiopia is on the brink of war. This child of expatriates realizes, “This isn’t your fight.” Of a fellow Ethiopian he says: “I think he saw me as an expatriate, someone without a stake in this war. Despite being born in the same compound…despite speaking Amharic like a native…I was a ferengi —a foreigner.”

The different personalities of Marion and Shiva force a distance between the brothers as they grow. While Marion emerges as the shy, studious, and sincere one, Shiva is his opposite. During the boys’ final year at the Loomis Town & Country School run by British expats, an event separates the boys even further.

Genet, the daughter of the boys’ nanny, is their classmate, and Marion’s first love. One day as the three study together for their final exams, Genet can’t stop herself from asking Shiva about his first sexual encounter, which she has learned of from Marion. “‘Tell me about it, Shiva,’ Genet whisper[s] from behind her book Chemistry by Concept .” As Shiva details how he lost his virginity, Marion is “terribly aroused…seeing the sultry look in Genet’s eyes…and knowing she [is] willing.” When Marion can’t control himself any longer, he leaves, pretending he can’t study there. Later that day, as he is headed to the house, Marion sees Rosina, Genet’s mother. She slaps him twice, says, “Five minutes I leave you alone, and this is what happens! So clever, you pretending to go to souk, and she to the bathroom.” She flings her daughter’s panties at his face: “Her blood…and your seed.” Even though he knows it was Shiva who had been with Genet, Marion just stares dumbly. Marion’s “love had been turned into a mockery. [He] had no reason, no desire, to do anything anymore.” The incident drives the brothers apart.

Sharing an interest in medicine, Marion becomes a surgeon like his father Thomas Stone, and Shiva becomes an expert in fistula operations, merely by observing Hema and devouring books on his own. Cutting for Stone confronts the harrowing procedure of female genital cutting, which is practiced in several countries in Africa, including Ethiopia. Young girls are forced into FGC; unskilled practitioners are known to use stones or rusty instruments, giving rise to fistulas and barrenness, besides emotional and psychological stress. A considerable section of the novel is dedicated to the problems that arise from the practice of FCG after Genet goes through it herself. It begins a chapter in her life that destroys her world. Her mother Rosina commits suicide, it appears, because of guilt. It is also the cause of pandemonium in the lives of the main cast of the novel. Years later when Genet and Marion reunite in Queens, New York, she can only talk about it in broken and unfinished sentences: “I am bleeding because the scars…I always bleed with…intercourse. Rosina’s gift to me. So that I will always think of her when—”

The prose in Cutting for Stone is simple, effective, and at times poetic. Several times over the course of reading the novel, I wondered how much of it was autobiographical. Line after line of simple sentences paint an objective picture that suffuses the characters with lifelikeness and honesty. One of the many instances of the surgeon-turned-writer’s poetic capabilities is seen in Marion’s first descriptions of New York. The “freeways looping over one another” are “like tangled tapeworms.” The speedometer of the taxi is “wider than the steering wheel, as if Dali had grabbed the round gauge and pulled its ears.” In one of their first actual meetings, Marion describes every action of his father: “He slumped down in the chair. He had crossed his legs, and hooked his free foot under the calf of the other, like a twisted vine.”

Cutting for Stone has the power to evoke cathartic reactions, much like Greek tragedies. The interest in the novel does not hinge upon the suspense created by Dr. Thomas Stone’s disappearance at the beginning; the point of the novel is in telling a loaded, fascinating, and riveting story. Medicine is both a reason for life and death in Cutting for Stone . It is also a through-line in the novel. The surgical and complicated medical terminology does not interfere with the pace of the novel, is neither esoteric, nor does it sound explanatory. The characters are skilled masters of the art like Thomas Stone, Marion, Hema, and Gosh, apprentices like Shiva, or patients like Genet. At one point, Marion says this of the taxi driver in New York: “Perhaps when one has driven a taxi for a long time, the passenger becomes an object defined by destination and nothing else, just as (if one isn’t careful) patients can become the ‘diabetic foot in bed two’ or the ‘myocardial infarction in bed three.’” Medicine is this invisible force that acts as a magnet, attracting and detracting them, and whether they are friends or foes, it sustains them.

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Book Club Discussion Questions for Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese

Cutting For Stone

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Feb 3, 2009, 560 pages
Jan 2010, 560 pages

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Book Club Questions

Book Club Discussion Questions

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

Abraham Verghese has said that his ambition in writing Cutting for Stone was to "tell a great story, an old-fashioned, truth-telling story." In what ways is Cutting for Stone an old-fashioned story-and what does it share with the great novels of the nineteenth century? What essential human truths does it convey?
What does Cutting for Stone reveal about the emotional lives of doctors? Contrast the attitudes of Hema, Ghosh, Marion, Shiva, and Thomas Stone toward their work. What draws each of them to the practice of medicine? How are they affected, emotionally and otherwise, by the work they do?
Marion observes that in Ethiopia, patients assume that all illnesses are fatal and that death is expected, but in America, news of having a fatal illness "always seemed to come as a surprise, as if we took it for granted that we were immortal" (p. 396). What other important differences does Cutting for Stone reveal about the way illness is viewed and treated in Ethiopia and in the United States? To what extent are these differences reflected in the split between poor hospitals, like the one in the Bronx where Marion works, and rich hospitals like the one in Boston where his father works?
In the novel, Thomas Stone asks, "What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?" The correct answer is "Words of comfort." How does this moment encapsulate the book's surprising take on medicine? Have your experiences with doctors and hospitals held this to be true? Why or why not? What does Cutting for Stone tell us about the roles of compassion, faith, and hope in medicine?
There are a number of dramatic scenes on operating tables in Cutting for Stone: the twins' births, Thomas Stone amputating his own finger, Ghosh untwisting Colonel Mebratu's volvulus, the liver transplant, etc. How does Verghese use medical detail to create tension and surprise? What do his depictions of dramatic surgeries share with film and television hospital dramas-and yet how are they different?
Marion suffers a series of painful betrayals-by his father, by Shiva, and by Genet. To what degree is he able, by the end of the novel, to forgive them?
To what extent does the story of Thomas Stone's childhood soften Marion's judgment of him? How does Thomas's suffering as a child, the illness of his parents, and his own illness help to explain why he abandons Shiva and Marion at their birth? How should Thomas finally be judged?
In what important ways does Marion come to resemble his father, although he grows up without him? How does Marion grow and change over the course of the novel?
A passionate, unique love affair sets Cutting for Stone in motion, and yet this romance remains a mystery-even to the key players-until the very conclusion of the novel. How does the relationship between Sister Mary Joseph Praise and Thomas Stone affect the lives of Shiva and Marion, Hema and Ghosh, Matron and everyone else at Missing? What do you think Verghese is trying to say about the nature of love and loss?
What do Hema, Matron, Rosina, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, Genet, and Tsige-as well as the many women who come to Missing seeking medical treatment-reveal about what life is like for women in Ethiopia?
Addis Ababa is at once a cosmopolitan city thrumming with life and the center of a dictatorship rife with conflict. How do the influences of Ethiopia's various rulers-England, Italy, Emperor Selassie-reveal themselves in day-to-day life? How does growing up there affect Marion's and Shiva's worldviews?
As Ghosh nears death, Marion comments that the man who raised him had no worries or regrets, that "there was no restitution he needed to make, no moment he failed to seize" (p. 346). What is the key to Ghosh's contentment? What makes him such a good father, doctor, and teacher? What wisdom does he impart to Marion?
Although it's also a play on the surname of the characters, the title Cutting for Stone comes from a line in the Hippocratic Oath: "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." Verghese has said that this line comes from ancient times, when bladder stones were epidemic and painful: "There were itinerant stone cutters-lithologists-who could cut into either the bladder or the perineum and get the stone out, but because they cleaned the knife by wiping their blood-stiffened surgical aprons, patients usually died of infection the next day." How does this line resonate for the doctors in the novel?
Almost all of the characters in Cutting for Stone are living in some sort of exile, self-imposed or forced, from their home country-Hema and Ghosh from India, Marion from Ethiopia, Thomas from India and then Ethiopia. Verghese is of Indian descent but was born and raised in Ethiopia, went to medical school in India, and has lived and worked in the United States for many years. What do you think this novel says about exile and the immigrant experience? How does exile change these characters, and what do they find themselves missing the most about home?

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Vintage. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.

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Book Review :: Cutting for Stone

The story spans more than 50 years and is told in first person by Marion Stone, eldest of Siamese twins, cut apart during their birth at a mission hospital in Ethiopia. Their mother, a Catholic nurse / nun, dies during the birth. Their father, a surgeon, takes off, shocked and surprised by his assistant’s labor. Their birth is then conducted by Hema, female OB/Gyn specialist, and Ghosh, a physician now turned surgeon due to Stone’s absence.

Hema and Ghosh raise ShivaMarion, as the boys are known, in the midst of their country’s revolution and at the hospital where their mother is idealized and their father demonized. While both boys end up in medicine, Marion finds himself in the US and eventually crosses paths with his father who is now an expert in the field of transplantation.

If last year’s favorite read The Space Between Us rose the top because of its richly layered relationships among women, then Cutting for Stone is its male counterpart. Marion and Shivas’ relationships with each other, with their two fathers and mothers – the ones who raised them and the ones who’s DNA they share – and a young girl raised as their sister, are beautifully crafted, dissected and exposed.

Vergehese is a physician by trade, and while it is clearly evident in the details of the many medical events that serve as narrative milestones, it never gets in the way of a non-clinical reader. However, since I finished it, I have asked several physicians if they’ve read it. I’m eager to hear a physician’s take.

Several themes in the book collide with those of my “real” job in healthcare communications. The shortage of physicians and the huge asset foreign-trained physicians are to American hospitals, the politics of wealthy health systems vs. the crash trauma centers, and risk / reward relationship of live-donor transplantation, to name just a few. As I’m processing this, I see that the overriding theme is the dichotomy of the have’s and the have not’s – whether it be a rich health system, a government funded trauma center or a charity hospital in a remote village of a third-world country. The resources at stake may be money or medicine, physicians or organs.

I must not neglect to mention how much I love the title and the varied meanings it has throughout. As mentioned both in a chapter intro and in the acknowledgment, “ I will not cut for stone …” is taken from the classic translation of the Hippocratic Oath. It refers to a time when physicians and surgeons were considered separate professions, and the physician vowed to not treat what would be better treated by a surgeon-specialist.

I’ve seen where Cutting for Stone was at the top of many readers and reviewers favorites from 2009, and after experiencing it for myself, I understand why. This one receives my highest praise.

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Add your guide, you are here:, cutting for stone.

I’ve been telling everybody to read this superb novel from Abraham Verghese. It is refreshing on every level --- from the setting (Ethiopia) to its characters (Indian medical workers, twin boys borne of a nun) to a complex web of storylines that covers every emotional base. This is one of those books you don’t want to see end and that will leave you hungry for more.

Shiva and Marion Stone are identical twins. In the womb, they were joined by a small “stalk” at the head, but during a rather traumatic birth this physical tie is severed, leaving behind an intimate relationship unique to such siblings. In fact, for many years, when sharing a crib or bed, they sleep with their heads just touching, perhaps in the place where the long-gone bond once existed. Their mother, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, is a surgical nurse whose skills in the theatre are mythic. The surgeon (and presumed father of the boys) with whom she worked as closely as though their four hands moved with one thought is Dr. Thomas Stone. The Sister and the Doctor’s first encounter is as shipmates bound for medical service in Ethiopia, a meeting filled with portent as Sister Mary Joseph singlehandedly saves Stone’s life on the voyage.

By different routes, both Sister Mary Joseph and Stone end up at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa, locally known as the Missing Hospital --- a mispronunciation of mission. Throughout the book, the political unrest and upheaval of Ethiopia is a constant backdrop. At times, the violence outside their gates even intrudes upon the grounds of the hospital disrupting its humanitarian objectives.

Shiva and Marion are raised by Hema and Ghosh, two of the hospital’s other doctors, both of whom come into their own throughout the course of the book. The rest of the hospital’s community --- the Matron, various nurses and household workers --- also play a role in their upbringing, helping to fill the void left by both their departed and deceased parents. Living within this environment and under the long shadows of their legendary parents, both boys discover great yet completely diverse strengths in the world of medicine in which they reside.

As the years pass, Marion follows his father’s footsteps into surgery and eventually to America, where we learn a lot about the life of foreign medical students brought to this country to finish their studies and to serve as affordable health care providers for our nation’s many lower-income medical facilities. Shiva remains in Ethiopia where he assists Hema in both national and world-wide campaigns to better women’s reproductive health. While both boys have much experience with life and death decisions --- from their birth, to living in a war zone, to tending third world patients for whom every day can be just such a battle --- the book’s climax is reached when one more life or death situation is placed before them.

It is impossible to fully explore the incredible depth of CUTTING FOR STONE within a few paragraphs. Each character is so fully developed from start to finish that the reader becomes deeply involved with each and every one. Verghese’s skill at intertwining so many stories is awesome and prohibits simple description of the novel as a whole. Suffice it to say that it is deserving of every rave review, every critic’s recommendation and my feeling that it is truly THE book of Winter 2009. This is the book you need to put at the top of your reading list right now .

Reviewed by Jamie Layton on December 29, 2010

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Publication Date: February 3, 2009
Genres: Fiction
Hardcover: 560 pages
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN-10: 0375414495
ISBN-13: 9780375414497

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Cutting for Stone Paperback – January 26, 2010

Print length 667 pages
Language English
Publisher Vintage
Publication date January 26, 2010
Dimensions 5.16 x 1.15 x 8.01 inches
ISBN-10 9780375714368
ISBN-13 978-0375714368
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unforgettable story of twin brothers whose fates are forever entwined

Editorial Reviews

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0375714367
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; First Edition (January 26, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 667 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780375714368
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0375714368
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.05 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.16 x 1.15 x 8.01 inches
#19 in Medical Fiction (Books)
#165 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
#381 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Abraham verghese.

ABRAHAM VERGHESE is the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor and Vice Chair of Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine. He sees patients, teaches students, and writes.

From 1990 to 1991, Abraham Verghese attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop at The University of Iowa, where he obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree.

His first book, MY OWN COUNTRY, about AIDS in rural Tennessee, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1994 and was made into a movie directed by Mira Nair and starring Naveen Andrews, Marisa Tomei, Glenne Headley and others.

His second book, THE TENNIS PARTNER, was a New York Times notable book and a national bestseller.

His third book, CUTTING FOR STONE was an epic love story, medical story and family saga. It appeared in hardback in 2009, and is in its 9th printing and is being translated into 16 languages. It is a Vintage paperback and was on the New York Times bestseller list for over 110 weeks at this writing.

His latest novel, THE COVENANT OF WATER, is forthcoming from Grove Press (May 2, 2023).

Verghese has honorary degrees from five universities and has published extensively in the medical literature, and his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Granta, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama in 2016.

His writing, both non-fiction and fiction, has to do with his view of medicine as a passionate and romantic pursuit; he sees the bedside skill and ritual of examining the patient as critical, cost saving, time-honored and necessary, though it is threatened in this technological age. He coined the term the 'iPatient' to describe the phenomenon of the virtual patient in the computer becoming the object of attention to the detriment of the real patient in the bed. His is an important voice for humanism in medicine and for anticipating the unwanted consequences of new technologies before they are introduced.

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Customers find the story fascinating, memorable, and sweeping. They praise the writing quality as fantastic, descriptive, and alluring. Readers say the book rewards them with life-affirming lessons and detailed disease descriptions. They find the characters well-developed, flawed, and relatable. They appreciate the historical accuracy and emotional content.

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Customers find the story fascinating, memorable, and sweeping. They describe the book as an impressive piece of literary fiction that brings surgery and medicine to life. Readers also appreciate the unpredictability of the story.

"...Great novel. Great characters. Lots of plot . Long. But worth it. Please read it. You'll like it." Read more

"...In conclusion, "Cutting for Stone" is an absolute gem, rich in both its storytelling and its profound reflection on the human experience...." Read more

"...I'm giving the book 4 stars. This is an impressive piece of literary fiction that brings surgery and medicine to life in a way I've never seen before..." Read more

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Customers find the book thought-provoking, captivating, and brilliant. They say it educates the reader with detailed diseases, surgical procedures, and thoughts of life. Readers also mention the book is poignant, inspiring, and heartwarming.

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Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Publication Date: February 3, 2009
Genres: Fiction
Hardcover: 560 pages
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN-10: 0375414495
ISBN-13: 9780375414497
About the Book
Reading Guide (PDF)
Critical Praise

Karissa Reads Books

Book Review: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese (Vintage Canada, 2010)

I had put off reading Cutting for Stone for quite some time, mostly, I think, from a fear that it couldn’t live up to its hype. The good news is, it definitely can and does

The book is set in Addis, Ethiopa in the 1950s and 60s. Knowing very little about that time and place, I found Verghese’s descriptions fascinating. He draws the city well – its disparate backgrounds and all the unique history and colonialism that shaped it. After reading about it, I felt like I wanted to visit Ethiopia. The central setting of the novel is Missing Hospital (officially “Mission Hospital” but known as Missing locally). The story opens with a surprise birth – a nun who works at the hospital has gone into labour, despite the fact no one knew she was pregnant. Identical twin boys, Shiva and Marion, are born as their mother dies and their father flees.

Verghese is a doctor in his own real life and it shows in his writing. He doesn’t shy away from detailed, realistic, and graphic descriptions of illness, surgery, and anatomy. I don’t think of myself as a squeamish person but I did find a lot of it hard to read. I’m simply not used to having the interiors of human beings described in such rich detail and so found it difficult to read some of the lengthier descriptions. Medicine is a big part of the story though. Shiva and Marion are raised in the hospital, among the patients, by two doctors. Illness and healing shape their lives in a myriad of ways and are hard things to avoid. While for most readers, I think Verghese is overly detailed in this aspect, a lot of it is interesting and, again, he does a good job of explaining things.

Marion is our narrator and Verghese really brings to life the strange and incredibly close bond of these twin brothers. How natural it feels to them and yet how it can slowly unravel over time. The story spans years of Shiva and Marion’s lives (almost all, in fact) as well as mapping out a crucial and tumultuous period of Ethiopian history. The political background is important and, again, Verghese does a good job of explaining what the reader needs to know without either over-explaining or speaking down to us.

I did feel that the book went on a touch too long. There were at least two places where it could have ended and been a complete book and although what came after wasn’t bad I wonder how much it really added to the story. Without giving anything away, I found the story wound up a little too tidily. Verghese seems to lean a bit much on an emotional rollercoaster technique as climax rather than letting his excellent characters and writing find their ending more naturally. That said, Cutting for Stone is still well worth a read.

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4 thoughts on “Book Review: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese”

I don’t think I ever read a book set in Ethiopia. It sounds really interesting! Why do the locals call it the “Missing” hospital?

I don’t think I ever had either. It seems like such a fascinating country – I knew very little about it before reading this one.

The name basically comes from a mispronunciation by the locals of “Mission”.

[…] Cutting for Stone – Abraham Verghese (Vintage Canada, 2010) […]

[…] read Cutting for Stone last year, I already knew Verghese as a talented writer and a medical doctor in his daily life.The […]

CUTTING FOR STONE

by Abraham Verghese ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2009

A bold but flawed debut novel.

There’s a mystery, a coming-of-age, abundant melodrama and even more abundant medical lore in this idiosyncratic first novel from a doctor best known for the memoir My Own Country (1994).

The nun is struggling to give birth in the hospital. The surgeon (is he also the father?) dithers. The late-arriving OB-GYN takes charge, losing the mother but saving her babies, identical twins. We are in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1954. The Indian nun, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, was a trained nurse who had met the British surgeon Thomas Stone on a sea voyage ministering to passengers dying of typhus. She then served as his assistant for seven years. The emotionally repressed Stone never declared his love for her; had they really done the deed? After the delivery, Stone rejects the babies and leaves Ethiopia. This is good news for Hema (Dr. Hemalatha, the Indian gynecologist), who becomes their surrogate mother and names them Shiva and Marion. When Shiva stops breathing, Dr. Ghosh (another Indian) diagnoses his apnea; again, a medical emergency throws two characters together. Ghosh and Hema marry and make a happy family of four. Marion eventually emerges as narrator. “Where but in medicine,” he asks, “might our conjoined, matricidal, patrifugal, twisted fate be explained?” The question is key, revealing Verghese’s intent: a family saga in the context of medicine. The ambition is laudable, but too often accounts of operations—a bowel obstruction here, a vasectomy there—overwhelm the narrative. Characterization suffers. The boys’ Ethiopian identity goes unexplored. Shiva is an enigma, though it’s no surprise he’ll have a medical career, like his brother, though far less orthodox. They become estranged over a girl, and eventually Marion leaves for America and an internship in the Bronx (the final, most suspenseful section). Once again a medical emergency defines the characters, though they are not large enough to fill the positively operatic roles Verghese has ordained for them.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-375-41449-7

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008

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by Abraham Verghese

LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.

Pub Date: April 5, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-41224-7

Page Count: 304

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996

More by Graham Swift

by Graham Swift

by Colson Whitehead ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 28, 2009

Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.

Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.

Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut ( The Intuitionist , 1999) and its successor ( John Henry Days , 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.

Pub Date: April 28, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Doubleday

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009

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by Colson Whitehead

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Reading guide: Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

A woman leaves behind her old life to join a spiritual retreat in rural Australia in Charlotte Wood’s fearless exploration of forgiveness, grief and female friendship

Whether you’re new to Stone Yard Devotional or have read it and would like to explore it more deeply, here is our comprehensive guide, featuring insights from critics, our judges and the book’s author, as well as discussion points and suggestions for further reading.

Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves the big city to return to the area where she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of New South Wales. She doesn’t believe in God, yet finds herself living a strange, reclusive existence almost by accident. A temporary visit becomes something much more permanent.

But disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signalling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a member of the community who disappeared decades before, presumed murdered. And finally, a troubling visitor plunges the narrator further back into her past…

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The main characters

The narrator

The narrator, whose name is never revealed, has decided to give up her life – including her job and marriage – in Sydney for reasons that are unclear. She returns to rural New South Wales and takes shelter in a convent in her small hometown. An atheist, she doesn’t involve herself in the religious traditions of the convent, instead helping with everyday domestic duties.

Helen Parry

Helen Parry is a celebrated nun who lived in the same town as the narrator, attending the same school for a short time until a bullying event caused her to move away. After living overseas she comes back to the convent, accompanying the remains of a nun who was murdered.

About the author

Charlotte Wood lives in Sydney. She is the author of seven novels and three works of non-fiction. Her novel The Natural Way of Things won a number of Australian awards: the 2016 Stella Prize, the Indie Book of the Year and Novel of the Year Awards, and was joint winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction. Her next novel, The Weekend , was an international bestseller and was shortlisted for the 2020 Stella Prize, the Prime Minister’s Literary Award and the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. In 2019 she was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) and named one of the Australian Financial Review’s 100 Women of Influence. Her features and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, Literary Hub and Sydney Morning Herald , among others.

Charlotte Wood

What the critics said

Frank Cottrell-Boyce, The Guardian

‘Wood is a writer of the most intense attention. Everything here – the way mice move, the way two women pass each other a confiding look, the way a hero can love the world but also be brusque and inconsiderate to those around them – it all rings true. It’s the story of a small group of people in a tiny town, but its resonance is global. This is a powerful, generous book.’

Shady Cosgrove, The Conversation

‘ Stone Yard Devotional offers line-by-line writing that haunts, and descriptions and ways of seeing the world that linger. The novel’s ideas and questions have made me consider the complicated nature of belonging as a woman in a patriarchal order where women are frequently pitted against each other, and how complicated female relationships can be.’

Astrid Edwards, The Times Literary Supplement

‘Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional is a novel of austere contemplation and personal devastation, its narrative driven by moral crisis rather than worldly action.’

Gemma Nisbet, The West Australian

‘Some readers may, I suspect, find Stone Yard Devotional more elusive than Wood’s previous two literary hits, The Natural Way of Things and The Weekend . But this is my favourite of her novels that I’ve yet read: written in beautifully understated prose, it’s intimate, engaging and willing to sit with the complexities of the timely questions it poses about community, forgiveness, the things we prefer not to see, and how to do — and be — “good”.’

Kim Forrester, Reading Matters

‘It feels like a memoir given all the anecdotes and recollections of childhood guilt and parental influences, coupled with diary entries that come right out of the Helen Garner school of observational writing. But I soon became hypnotised by the meditative prose and the clear-eyed self-analysis that pulls no punches. It’s a tale about being human and overcoming troubling emotions — grief, despair and guilt — so that we can heal, regain a sense of peace and move forward in life. I really enjoyed it and thought it most closely resembled Wood’s 2004 novel, The Submerged Cathedral , which I now believe was based on her mother’s life.’

What the Booker Prize judges said

‘The novel is set in a claustrophobic environment and reveals the vastness of human minds: the juxtaposition is so artfully done that a reader feels trusted by the author to be an intellectual partner in this exchange, rather than a passive recipient of stories and messages.

‘Contemporary issues – climate change and a global pandemic – can sometimes appear as flat concepts or stale ideas in fiction, but Stone Yard Devotional is able to make both topics locally and vividly felt as haunting human stories.’

The Booker Prize 2024 judges with the longlist

What the author said

‘ Stone Yard Devotional grew from elements of my own life and childhood merging with an entirely invented story about an enclosed religious community. Writing it during pandemic lockdowns, followed by a serious illness – and the way these twin upheavals demolished so many of our consoling certainties – gave me an urgent instinct to shed anything inessential in my work. I wanted nothing trivial, nothing insincere in this book. And I wanted to try to master what Saul Bellow called “stillness in the midst of chaos”, risking a tonal restraint and depth that at the same time, I hope, shimmers with energy.’

Read the full interview here .

Questions and discussion points

Stone Yard Devotional opens with an epigraph from songwriter Nick Cave: ‘I felt chastened by the world’. How does this quote set the tone for the novel, and in what ways does it resonate with the narrator’s journey as the story begins?

The novel is structured almost like a diary, providing a line-by-line account of the narrator’s activities and thoughts, along with their impact on her. How did this structure serve the story, and what effect did it have on the reading experience?

The narrator remains unnamed throughout the novel, and her life before arriving at the convent is only hinted at, through brief glimpses. Why do you think Wood chose to leave the specific details of the narrator’s past unexplored? How does this ambiguity shape your perception of her character, and do you think it contributes to her being seen as an unreliable narrator?

Despite living in a convent, it’s noted that the narrator is an atheist and never takes religious vows. Why do you think Wood made the narrator a non-believer, and how does this aspect of her character shape the novel’s exploration of faith and spirituality?

Johanna Thomas-Corr wrote in The Times that ‘Charlotte Wood does for mice in her seventh novel what Alfred Hitchcock did for birds,’ referring to the plague of rodents that serves as a backdrop to the story. Why do you think Wood chose to make this event a central theme? What symbolic meaning might it carry and what could it serve as a metaphor for in the novel’s larger narrative?

The Booker Prize judges highlighted that Stone Yard Devotional delves into climate grief and catastrophe, describing it as ‘the world we have to find a way to understand and the world we have to find a way to live in today and tomorrow’. In what ways does the novel convey these real-world experiences through relatable human stories? Does it make the themes of climate change and its impact accessible to readers?

While writing Stone Yard Devotional , Wood and her two sisters were diagnosed with cancer, an experience she described to ABC Australia as a ‘psychic calamity’ that made everything feel ‘more elemental, more rigorous and stringent’. She emphasised that she only included what truly mattered in the novel. (‘I wanted nothing extraneous in this book.’) Where do you see parallels between this deeply personal experience and the novel’s exploration of mortality and the stripping away of what is non-essential?

On a winter morning towards the end of the novel, the narrator reflects on the loss of her parents: ‘My inability to get over my parents’ deaths has been a source of lifelong shame to me […] I’m eternally stuck; a lumbering, crying, self-pitying child’. Why might the narrator feel ‘shame’ over this? In what ways do moments such as these shape the novel’s exploration of grief and forgiveness?

In an interview with the Booker Prizes , Wood said: ‘I wanted to try to master what Saul Bellow called “stillness in the midst of chaos”.’ To what extent do you think she mastered it?

Resources and further reading

Times Literary Supplement : Shelter from the storm

Allen & Unwin: Charlotte Wood Discusses Stone Yard Devotional

Roaring Stories Bookshop: Charlotte Wood in conversation with Tegan Bennett Daylight | Stone Yard Devotional

If you enjoyed this book, why not try

The Weekend by Charlotte Wood

The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein

Pearl by Siân Hughes

A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson

Stone Yard Devotional

Read more on the booker prize 2024 shortlist, six things you need to know about the booker prize 2024 shortlist.

As the Booker Prize 2024 shortlist is announced, we’ve picked out the most interesting facts, trends and themes that have emerged in this year’s selection

Read extracts from the Booker Prize 2024 shortlist

Discover our reading guides for the booker prize 2024 shortlist, meet the authors: read our q&as with the booker prize 2024 shortlistees, what our judges said about the booker prize 2024 shortlist.

Book recommendations

What the judges said about the Booker Prize 2024 shortlist

The 2024 longlistees on the book that inspired them to become a writer, charlotte wood interview: ‘i wanted nothing trivial, nothing insincere in this book’, quiz: which book from the booker prize 2024 longlist should you read first.

Book extract

An extract from Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

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Book Review: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
Cutting for Stone: Robert Verghese: 9781615233861: Amazon.com: Books
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Cutting for Stone primarily follows Marion as he grows up in Ethiopia and then immigrates to the US. That's a pretty weak synopsis, but it's hard to capture this book in just a few sentences. It started off just a little slow, which is why I'm only giving it 4.5 stars. I could see the potential for a fantastic story so I kept reading, but ...
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One of BookBrowse's Top 3 Favorite Books of 2009, a novel set in Ethiopia and America in the latter part of the 20th century. 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 ...
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This is the book you need to put at the top of your reading list right now. Reviewed by Jamie Layton on December 29, 2010. Cutting for Stone. by Abraham Verghese. Publication Date: February 3, 2009. Genres: Fiction. Hardcover: 560 pages. Publisher: Knopf. ISBN-10: 0375414495.
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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 Ababa's Missing Hospital (a mispronunciation of "Mission ...
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Review: Cutting for Stone
December 6, 2011 Reviews. Book by ABRAHAM VERGHESE. Reviewed by MANISHA SHARMA. Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese's debut novel, is nothing less than an epic in prose. The long narrative, setting, characters, conflicts, and quotations that read as invocations all set out to prove this. It begins with the lines from Gitanjali, the celebrated ...
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Abraham Vergehese's Cutting for Stone is an early contender for my best read of 2010. The story spans more than 50 years and is told in first person by Marion Stone, eldest of Siamese twins, cut apart during their birth at a mission hospital in Ethiopia. Their mother, a Catholic nurse / nun, dies during the birth.
Cutting for Stone
This is the book you need to put at the top of your reading list right now. Reviewed by Jamie Layton on December 29, 2010. Cutting for Stone. by Abraham Verghese. Publication Date: February 3, 2009. Genres: Fiction. Hardcover: 560 pages. Publisher: Knopf. ISBN-10: 0375414495.
Cutting for Stone: Verghese, Abraham: 9780375714368: Amazon.com: Books
Cutting for Stone. Paperback - January 26, 2010. NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of The Covenant of Water: An enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home. • "Filled with mystical scenes and deeply felt characters.... Verghese is something of a magician as a novelist." —USA Today.
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Book Review: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese (Vintage Canada, 2010) I had put off reading Cutting for Stone for quite some time, mostly, I think, from a fear that it couldn't live up to its hype.The good news is, it definitely can and does. The book is set in Addis, Ethiopa in the 1950s and 60s.
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Reading guide: Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

Buy the book

The main characters

About the author

What the critics said

What the Booker Prize judges said

What the author said

Questions and discussion points

Resources and further reading

If you enjoyed this book, why not try

Stone Yard Devotional

Read extracts from the Booker Prize 2024 shortlist

What the judges said about the Booker Prize 2024 shortlist

An extract from Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

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