Out of his experience comes a startling but ultimately uplifting portrait of the American heartland as it confronts and surmounts its deepest prejudices and fears. Verghese brought a singular perspective to Johnson City: as a doctor unique in his abilities as an outsider who could talk to people suspicious of local practitioners above all, as a writer of grace and compassion who saw that what was happening in this conservative community was both a medical and a spiritual emergency. Verghese became by necessity the local AIDS expert, soon besieged by a shocking number of male and female patients whose stories came to occupy his mind, and even take over his life. Working in Johnson City was Abraham Verghese, a young Indian doctor specializing in infectious diseases. But when the local hospital treated its first AIDS patient, a crisis that had once seemed an urban problem had arrived in the town to stay. Nestled in the Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee, the town of Johnson City had always seemed exempt from the anxieties of modern American life. 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.Īn 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. He makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as an intern at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. 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. 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.

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. A sweeping, emotionally riveting first novel – an enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home.

Abraham verghese books