Depending on your point of view, the transplantation of a human heart is a miracle, a violation, a leap of faith, an act of sacrilege. It’s a dream come true, a death postponed, a biomedical triumph, a day job. [loc. 199]
Keira, aged nine, is fatally injured in a traffic accident: her heart keeps beating but she is brain-dead. Max, also aged nine, has been in hospital for almost a year because his heart is failing. This is the story of how Keira (and, more actively, her family) saved Max, and of the people involved in the heart transplant - doctors, nurses, couriers, porters... It's a compassionate and engaging work of narrative non-fiction, this is the story of a heart transplant, and of how the death of one child and the saving of another led to a significant change in UK law.
While I was reading The Story of a Heart, it was announced as the winner of the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction: I hope this will prompt more people to read it. Clarke, trained as a doctor, is an excellent communicator of medical science: she's also adept at highlighting the little details. (Keira's young sisters, both convinced that she would have wanted to donate her organs, paint her fingernails orange while she's lying in intensive care.)
I found this a moving, fascinating and sometimes sobering book: I think it's what I was expecting when I read Mend the Living (a novel that I thought at first was non-fiction) some years ago. They're both very good books.
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