My Own Country

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist “A fine mix of compassion and precision . . . Verghese makes indelible narratives of his cases, and they read like wrenching short stories.”—Pico Iyer, Time Abraham Verghese has garnered worldwide acclaim for his New York Times bestselling novel The Covenant of Water, selected as an Oprah’s Book Club Pick and spanning the years 1900 to 1977 in Kerala, India. In his first book, My Own Country, Verghese examined an American crisis from the vantage of a small town nestled in the Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee, which had always seemed exempt from the anxieties of modern life. But when the local hospital treated its first AIDS patient in the 1980s, a crisis that had once seemed an “urban problem” arrived in town to stay. At the time, Abraham Verghese was a young doctor specializing in infectious diseases at a Johnson City hospital. Of necessity, he became the local AIDS expert, soon besieged by a shocking number of patients, men and women whose stories came to occupy his mind, and even take over his life. Verghese brought a singular perspective to Johnson City: a doctor unique in his abilities; an outsider who could talk to people suspicious of local practitioners; and a writer who saw that what was happening in this conservative community was both a medical and a spiritual emergency. Out of his experience comes a startling but ultimately uplifting portrait of the American heartland as it confronts—and surmounts—its deepest prejudices and fears.