The Story of a Heart: Two Families, One Heart, and the Medical Miracle That Saved a Child’s Life

Physician Clarke (Breathtaking) offers a profoundly moving account of how a pediatric heart transplant changed organ donation laws in Britain. In 2017, nine-year-old Keira Ball suffered a “catastrophic brain injury” as the result of a car crash. At her older sister’s insistence, Keira’s heart was donated to Max Johnson, a nine-year-old whose heart had been weakened by illness. The families eventually struck up a correspondence and successfully campaigned together to make organ donation an opt-out system in the U.K. Clarke’s impressive reporting offers a fly-on-the-wall account of how Keira’s heart made its way to Max (“Gloved hands cranked at stainless steel—it takes brute force to prize a rib cage apart. Max’s heart, once exposed, was slack and gargantuan”). Clarke also weaves in fascinating medical history, chronicling the development of ventilators during the 1950s polio epidemic and the first heart transplant, which was performed by an ill-prepared South African surgeon in 1967. However, the main draw is the heartrending story of how two families forged a path through tragedy (a particularly affecting scene describes how at the families’ first meeting, the Johnsons brought a stethoscope so the Balls could listen to Keira’s heart). A tearjerker that doubles as a first-rate medical history, this is a marvel. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Assoc. (Sept.)