Cutting for Stone Themes

One of the major themes in Cutting for Stone is that life is full of pain and suffering. Oof.Well, the good news is that it manages to be a pretty uplifting story, anyway. No, suffering can't be av...

The surgeons who populate Cutting for Stone might not be competing for title of World's Strongest Man, and they may not be looking to topple Usain Bolt—but all the same, they're dedicated, traine...

Don't get too attached to any of the characters in Cutting for Stone. Spoiler alert—everyone dies. Well, okay, not everyone—but almost everyone. It's not like there's some bloodbath, but the no...

Cutting for Stone is one of those come-full-circle novels: it begins where it ends, and it ends where it begins. It's about a man returning to the exact room where he was born and sitting down a de...

It's hard enough trying to figure out who you are as an individual, making it in the world. But when you're born as a set of twins, you might find that you're always defining yourself up against yo...

Let's be real: a lot of mega-depressing stuff goes down in this novel: suffering, death, abandonment, violence. All that pain and chaos could cause the characters to become embittered, expecting th...

An undercurrent of being left behind fills almost every page of Abraham Verghese's novel Cutting for Stone. That's partly because Marion and Shiva are abandoned by their father on the very day they...

Yeah, Cutting for Stone is full of sex.Unfortunately, it's usually not great sex, and it usually ends in disaster. From a deathly pregnancy to sexually transmitted infections and even ultimate betr...