About the Author: Samuel Shem
Samuel Shem (aka Stephen Bergman) is the author of several books of fiction including the bestseller The House of God. He is a doctor, novelist, playwright, and activist. A Rhodes Scholar, he was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School for three decades and founded the Bill W. and Dr. Bob Project in the Division on Addictions at Harvard Medical School. He divides his time between Boston, MA and Tierra Tranquila, Costa Rica.
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Samuel Shem
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Paperback, Published in Dec 2012 by Berkley
ISBN10: 0425258785 | ISBN13: 9780425258781
Page count: 416
Notorious for its Rabelaisian comedy, and celebrated for its humanism, Samuel Shem’s The House of God was hailed as “troubling and hilarious…brutally honest†(The New York Times), a “Catch-22 with stethoscopes†(Cosmopolitan). Now in his most ambitious novel yet, Shem returns to dissect the complicated relationships between mothers and sons, ghosts and bullies, doctors and patients, the past and the present, and love and death. Settled into a relationship with an Italian yoga instructor and working in Europe, Dr. Orville Rose's peace is shaken by his mother's death.
On his return to Columbia, a Hudson River town of quirky people and “plagued by breakage,†he learns that his mother has willed him a large sum of money, her 1981 Chrysler, and her Victorian house in the center of town. There's one odd catch: he must live in her house for one year and thirteen days. As he struggles with his decision—to stay and meet the terms of the will or return to his life in Italy—Orville reconnects with family, reunites with former friends, and comes to terms with old rivals and bitter memories. In the process he’ll discover his own history, as well as his mother’s, and finally learn what it really means to be a healer, and to be healed.
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