My own country : a doctor's story of a town and its people in the age of AIDS

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.