Hold on to your Slippers

Cutting for Stone
a novel by Abraham Verghese

In a 1950s Ethiopian mission hospital prophetically called Missing, conjoined twin boys survive a traumatic surprise birth. Their mother, a beautiful Indian nun who never revealed her pregnancy, dies, and Thomas Stone, the attending surgeon assumed to be the father, flees. The babies are separated but retain a bond so strong that narrator Marion often refers to them as one person: ShivaMarion.

Adopted by doctors Ghosh and Hema, who find their own love through the boys and return it generously, the twins grow up steeped in medical knowledge and practice, often to humorous effect: "Hema’s departures in the night [to deliver babies]came with cryptic phrases...: `eclampsia' or `postpartum hemorrhage' or, that most chilling term of all, the `Delayed Afterbird.' That one wasn’t even in the medical dictionary. And you never heard of the Afterbird except when it was Delayed. It was feared, and yet its arrival was necessary. Shiva and I looked for that Delayed Afterbird on the trees of Missing, or high up in the sky." Shades of Garp's Undertoad.