Abraham Verghese and Isabel Wilkerson Top President Obama’s Short-List of Summer Reads!

We are pleased to announce that President Obama’s Summer Reading List includes works by two of our speakers, Abraham Verghese and Isabel Wilkerson. The President will be flipping through Cutting for Stone and The Warmth of Other Suns while on family vacation in Martha’s Vineyard.

Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone, tells the tale of Marion and Shiva Stone, twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles–and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.

Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, chronicles a watershed event in American history–the decades-long migration of African-Americans from the South to the North and West, from World War I through the 1970s–through the stories of three individuals and their families. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land.

When you’re stopping by the bookstore to pick up these titles, make sure to also check-out summer must-reads by some of our other impressive speakers, including the New York Times best-sellers Maine by Courtney Sullivan, Conquistadora by Esmeralda Santiago, Erik Larson’s In The Garden of Beasts, and Jamie Ford’s Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.

For booking information on any of these sought-after speakers, please call 212-572-2013 or email us at rhspeakers@randomhouse.com.