'Cutting for Stone: A Novel' by Abraham Verghese

A novel set in Africa bears a heavy burden. The author must bring it home, that continent, into the reader's more defined existence: To help the reader sit in a chair and imagine Africa; vast, ancient, sorrowful, beautiful Africa. In the last decade I've read books narrated by characters homesick for Africa; books narrated by or about child soldiers; books about politics; books full of splintering history. Abraham Verghese's "Cutting for Stone" is the first straightforward, quotidian novel set in and largely about Africa that I've read in a good long time -- the kind Richard Russo or Cormac McCarthy might write, the kind that shows how history and landscape and accidents of birth and death conspire to create the story of a single life.

Perhaps it is because the narrator, Marion Stone, is a doctor that you know there will be pain, healing, distance, perspective and a phoenix rising from the ashes of human error. Stone reconstructs his half-century with a child's wonder: "I believe in black holes," he thinks, now many years a surgeon in New York and miles from the clinic in Ethiopia where he and his twin brother, Shiva, orphaned not by war but by one man's internal, ancestral war, grew up. "I believe that as the universe empties into nothingness, past and future will smack together in the last swirl around the drain."

The twins are orphaned when their mother, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, a lovely, saintly young nurse from India, dies in childbirth and when their father, a British surgeon named Thomas Stone, runs away from the clinic after the bloody birth, mortified and full of despair. Shiva and Marion are raised by the clinic's gynecologist, Hema, and her husband, a kindly doctor named Ghosh.

The childhood years, until the twins are 12 and Ethiopia's emperor Haile Selassie is overthrown, are richly written. Verghese knows that beauty is the best way to draw us in and his landscape is lush and exotic: Wild eucalyptus, golden meskel flowers, the Entoto Mountains, rain on the corrugated tin roofs "ceasing abruptly like a chatterbox cut off in mid-sentence."

The landscape and the characters who live and work in the clinic create something greater than a community, more like an organism. The intimacy of the twins, who sleep most nights with their heads touching (heads that were connected in utero and were separated forcefully at birth by their terrified father), the ghostly purity of their mother and the daily rhythms of the hospital create an inhabitable, safe place, on and off the page.