Author, physician, and professor Abraham Verghese's novel The Covenant of Water was released this week to rave reviews and is the latest Oprah Book Club selection. Verghese was born in Ethiopia to Indian parents, and his family moved to the United States after the overthrow of Haile Selassie. He worked briefly as an orderly before finishing medical school in India. Verghese's residency was in Johnson City, Tenn., where he encountered the initial wave of rural HIV infections in the mid-1980s. His experiences with so many dying patients, most of them abandoned by their friends and families, inspired his first book, My Own Country (1994), which is used in many medical schools to convey the importance of compassion and empathy.
Verghese attended the Iowa Writers Workshop before accepting a professorship in El Paso, Texas. The breakdown of his first marriage and the death of his tennis partner, a medical resident struggling with drug addiction, inspired Verghese's second book, The Tennis Partner (1999). He now practices and teaches at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Verghese's first novel, Cutting for Stone (2009), sold more than a million copies and spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list. It follows the orphaned twins of a nun who dies in childbirth and an English surgeon who abandons them in Addis Ababa. They are raised in Ethiopia by an Indian couple, where tumultuous political events and adolescent rivalries force the brothers onto diverging paths. The novel showcases Verghese's medical knowledge with vivid depictions of many diseases and surgeries. Cutting for Stone is available in paperback from Vintage.