Through the lives of the children, we learn of Ethiopia’s colonial history, the rise of Emperor Haile Selassie, the problems of Eritrea, the crisis of poverty and health care that haunts the people, and the heroic and compassionate abilities of two doctors to serve a people whom they have adopted as their own. In this gloriously cosmopolitan, eccentric, and multilingual home, the twins grow up each with his own talents but connected by that mysterious ability of twins to communicate. The children are raised by Hema and Ghosh, who eventually marry for one year at a time, and are raised in a household supported by two women-one Eritrean with a daughter of her own and a childless Ethiopian woman. Even as he is botching the birth and nearly kills one of the babies, Hema arrives, the children are born but their mother dies and their father leaves the hospital never to return. The absence of the other resident surgeon, Ghosh, compels the father, Thomas Stone, to try and deliver the babies. Mary Joseph Praise, the mother, had managed to keep her pregnancy secret even from the father of the children until she went into labor. Marion and his twin, Shiva, arrive precipitously when the resident obstetrician, Hema, is in the midst of an air crash on her way back from India. The central character and narrator of some sections is Marion Praise Stone, the child of an English surgeon and an Indian nun who meet on board a ship bound to Ethiopia and eventually work at Missing (Mission) hospital in Addis Ababa in the 1950s. The novel is long and has a complex yet clear plot that spans several decades.
Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage”, a work that Verghese acknowledges as having influenced him. The novel’s heroic and compassionate doctors bring to mind W.
Like his non-fiction, the central focus of this work is also the practice of medicine. My Own Country was an NBCC finalist and 1994 best book for Time his second work, “The Tennis Partner” was a New York Times Notable Book. Many readers know Abraham Verghese as the author of the memorable “My Own Country” about working as a doctor in eastern Tennessee.
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