My Own Country

Abraham Verghese arrived in America at the same time as the AIDS virus arrived from Africa. He began practice in a small community in Tennessee, and, as young men started returning from the big cities, he found himself in the front line as sole provider of HIV care in the community.

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MY OWN COUNTRY is the extraordinary story of an Indian physician who settled in a rural town in Tennessee as a young doctor to AIDS patients. This is a book about illness and treatment, about how a small community reacts to the advent of AIDS, about doctor-patient relationships, the body in decline, the ritual of examination, and how Verghese, as a doctor, coped with the inevitability of death. Verghese creates, beyond the jargon of medicine, a lyrical and haunting language unique in this genre, and provides a narrative at once rich, absorbing and above all, moving.