The Story of a Heart: a 'heart-rending' account of two children and one heart

Dr. Rachel Clarke's 'finest book yet' blends the 'arresting and the informative'

Book cover of The Story Of A Heart by Rachel Clarke
Dr. Rachel Clarke traces the history of transplants right back to the very first organ donation
(Image credit: Hachette UK)

"In 2017, a nine-year-old girl from Devon was involved in a car crash that left her with a catastrophic brain injury," said Fiona Sturges in The Guardian. Knowing the person Keira was – someone who'd go "out of her way to rescue insects in distress" – her family immediately asked if she could donate her organs. Meanwhile, another nine- year-old lay on a hospital bed in Cheshire, "painfully thin and being kept alive with a mechanical heart pump". Max's heart had become "dangerously enlarged" after he'd developed acute cardiomyopathy; he and his family knew that only a transplant could save his life.

"In 'The Story of a Heart', Dr Rachel Clarke writes about the feat of modern medicine that allowed Keira to give life to Max by donating her heart." Her book is many things: "a tender account of two families linked by tragic circumstances"; the race-against-time tale of the "transfer of a human organ from one body to another"; a history of the surgical innovations that made this possible.

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The word "heart-rending" doesn't begin to cover many aspects of this story, said Helen Rumbelow in The Sunday Times. We see Max, "in the prison of his hospital bed", telling his parents that he no longer wants to live. We see Joe, Keira's father, standing outside the ambulance bay as his daughter's heart – newly cut from her chest – "speeds away from him for ever".