The Kennebunk Free Library is hosting a discussion of the book Cutting for Stone, by Ethiopian-born medical doctor and author Abraham Verghese on Thursday, February 18 at 2pm. This event is free and open to all.

According to the website Goodreads, this book is “a sweeping, emotionally riveting first novel — an enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home.”

Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Yet it will be love, not politics — their passion for the same woman—that will tear them apart and force Marion, fresh out of medical school, to flee his homeland. He makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as an intern at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to him — nearly destroying him — Marion must entrust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.

This discussion is organized by the Camden Conference in partnership with the World Affairs Council of Maine in anticipation of the 29th Annual Camden Conference “The New Africa,” February 19-21, 2016.

African Art and Textiles will be displayed at the Kennebunk Free Library in February 2016.