Truly an excellent book, and very highly recommended. I enjoy books that give you a lot to think about and discover, and this book has that in spades: contending narratives of Catholic grace vis-a-vis destruction and creation in the Hindu pantheon; the line between medicine and surgery, and the line between medicine and religion; the metaphor of a nation as an organism; the gray area between doing too much and doing too little - all of these topics, and more, are explored in this book. And beneath all of that is a compelling story (which does get a little long-winded sometimes) with striking, complicated characters (some of whom, like Hema and Genet, are unfortunately short shrifted toward the end of the book, after very promising introductions.) While I may be over-reading a bit, I also think there are echoes in this book of Heart of Darkness - it can be read as something like a mirror image to that book; certainly Verghese was only too happy to include lots of other literary allusions in his work. Finally, I should mention that I very much appreciate the setting and diversity of the cast of characters - we don’t get a lot of books set in modern-day Ethiopia, still less those in which doctors trained in India feature prominently. For that reason alone it’s worth a read.