Dr. Grant and the Mountain Nestorians by Thomas Laurie relates the biography of the eminent American missionary physician, Dr. Asahel Grant. Born in 1807, he studied medicine as a young man and became a Presbyterian missionary in 1834. Grant lived in Persia for ten years making a number of expeditions into the mountains of Kurdistan and establishing a mission at Ashitha intended to serve the needs of the people he identified as "Nestorians". In 1843, in the wake of Turkish and Kurdish violence against the Christians of the Church of the East, Grant and the people to whom he ministered were displaced to refugee camps near Mosul. Grant died shortly thereafter, in April of 1844.

Drawing extensively from Dr. Grant’s own letters and journals, Laurie’s narrative provides a lively account of the life and work of a little-known nineteenth-century missionary and opens windows on the intertwined histories of the Church of the East and American Protestantism in the cultural milieu of the Middle East of the nineteenth century.