Rating: 4.5 Stars
Published: May 2, 2023
Pages: 724
Genre: Historical Fiction
I saw a review of this book by one of my favorite bookish people on Instagram and being a historical fiction fan, I put it on my TBR for this year. This is my first interaction with the author’s work and I went into reading the book with no expectations even though the review was really captivating but without any spoilers.
The story follows three generations of an Indian family from the start of the 1900s to the 1970s. It begins with a 12-year-old girl who is married off by her uncle because her dear father had just passed away and her mother could no longer afford to take care of her. She leaves home not only to become a wife to a much older widower but the mother to a four-year-old child. After several years, she settles into married life and bears a child of her own but Jojo her stepson drowns and dies in an irrigation ditch. This is the first time her husband opens up to her about ‘the condition’ which has plagued the family for many generations. Big Ammachi as she is fondly called now fears for her child and unborn children if they too will have ‘the condition’ that takes lives in this family. This multi-generational story mirrors India’s history in these times through this family and their affiliations transporting us around several parts of the country and even beyond to Scotland and back. It carries several themes such as family bonds and lineage, colonialism and political upheaval, the caste system and social hierarchy in India, medical revelations, loss, grief, faith, and resilience.
I was captivated by the story from the beginning as I was sympathetic towards this 12-year-old who had to leave her mother and all that she knew to be married to a stranger way older than herself. I spent the entire time rooting for her and her family through loss, grief, joys, responsibilities, challenges, and lots more. When the story moved to Scotland, introducing another character, Digby who fate will later entwin with Big Ammachi’s family in a strange way, I also wanted to see him bloom after a hard childhood and other traumatic events that happened in his life. Unfortunately, life sometimes gives us hard knocks and blessings all wrapped together in one package.
This book was highly educative from both a historical and medical point of view. It was also raw and tender at the same time. The characters, though not really relatable to me, were well written and represented in a way that you could understand their choices based on their realities due to culture, religion and personalities. Big Ammachi was my favorite character as she was able to overcome whatever challenge thrown her way even from a very young age. Her trust in God especially in hard times was admirable and something to emulate. There is so much to unpack in this story, but it would risk my giving spoilers which I do not wish to give in my reviews so I will conclude by saying, this book was such a treat and if you love historical fiction, I bet that you will enjoy reading this book. The only downside to this book if I may, was that it was too long. However, I found myself missing the book after I finished reading it. It was like the story had become a part of me since it took me over two weeks to read.
I am definitely going on to read another book by the author that has been highly recommended, and I hope it would be as compelling as this book.
I highly recommend!
The Author:
Abraham Verghese, MD, MACP, is Professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Senior Associate Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine.
Born of Indian parents who were teachers in Ethiopia, he grew up near Addis Ababa and began his medical training there. When Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed, he completed his training at Madras Medical College and went to the United States for his residency as one of many foreign medical graduates. Like many others, he found only the less popular hospitals and communities open to him, an experience he described in one of his early New Yorker articles, The Cowpath to America.
From Johnson City, Tennessee, where he was a resident from 1980 to 1983, he did his fellowship at Boston University School of Medicine, working at Boston City Hospital for two years. It was here that he first saw the early signs of the HIV epidemic and later, when he returned to Johnson City as an assistant professor of medicine, he saw the second epidemic, rural AIDS, and his life took the turn for which he is most well known ? his caring for numerous AIDS patients in an era when little could be done and helping them through their early and painful deaths was often the most a physician could do.
His work with terminal patients and the insights he gained from the deep relationships he formed and the suffering he saw were intensely transformative; they became the basis for his first book, My Own Country : A Doctor’s Story, written later during his years in El Paso, Texas. Such was his interest in writing that he decided to take some time away from medicine to study at the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1991. Since then, his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Texas Monthly, Atlantic, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, Forbes.com, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.
Following Iowa, he became professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Texas Tech Health Sciences Center in El Paso, Texas, where he lived for the next 11 years. In addition to writing his first book, which was one of five chosen as Best Book of the Year by Time magazine and later made into a Mira Nair movie, he also wrote a second best-selling book, The Tennis Partner : A Story of Friendship and Loss, about his friend and tennis partner?s struggle with addiction. This was a New York Times’ Notable Book.
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