Content Warning: The source text contains descriptions of murder, death by suicide, animal abuse, maternal death, traumatic childbirth, sexual assault, and female genital mutilation.

The narrator, Marion Stone, and his twin brother, Shiva, are born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in September of 1954. Their mother, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, is a Carmelite nun who has worked at Missing Hospital, where the twins are born, for the past seven years. Sister dies in childbirth, and when Marion is four, he sits at his mother’s desk and wonders when she will come. Forty-six years later, he is back at the hospital, and her cardigan and picture of St. Theresa are still there.

When Marion was young, the Matron of Missing Hospital convinced him to choose an occupation that was difficult for him, so he became a surgeon. Marion’s passion is medicine, but he believes that his character is not suited to surgery, as it makes him nervous. He takes comfort in the fact that other surgeons seek him out when they need surgery, a sign of his competence. His father was also a surgeon, and Marion tries to emulate him in the operating theater. Now 50 years old, Marion has returned home and is performing surgery in the same operating theater in which he was born.