Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

I suggested this book to my book club and it was our February pick.  Many of my book friends have been reading it and it received numerous positive reviews. 

This novel is about a set of twins who are orphaned in an small Catholic Ethiopian hospital.  They are lovingly raised by a married doctors who work there.  The book chronicles their lives from birth through adulthood, spanning both Ethiopia and the U.S.  While the twins are very different personalities, they are quite close, and both become doctors themselves.  The narrative switches between a few different voices, but the majority of the story is told by one of the twins.  Though ultimately professionally successful, he struggles with issues of identity for much of his life, haunted by his missing parents. 

I liked this book but it was long in places. There were descriptions of medical procedures that seemed unnecessarily detailed, as well as a lot of detail around the political backdrop of Ethiopia.  That said, it was also stunning in places, with exceptional writing and twists in the story that I was not expecting.  About halfway through the book it dawned on my that the memoir I had just finished reading was also set in Ethiopia and it was interesting to compare the depiction of the country in both books.

For my doctor friends I'd say this is probably required fiction, for everyone else, it's for the readers more tolerant of a long, involved, densely written story.