The heart-rending story of a child’s heart transplant

Max Johnson’s life while he waited for a heart transplant had become so miserable and traumatic that he didn’t care whether he carried on or not. Indeed, the colourless, almost lifeless nine-year-old recorded a video saying he wanted to die. His parents felt as though they were on ‘death row’ as they waited for a donor. They knew, too, that the call announcing there was a heart for their son would mean that somewhere else in Britain a family was mourning. They would benefit from the sudden death of someone they were initially only told was an ‘age-appropriate donor’. Max’s mother read between the lines: her son was getting the heart of another nine-year-old.

That heart had belonged to Keira Ball, who enters Rachel Clarke’s extraordinary book full of life and with all the time in the world ahead of her – until she and her mother and siblings were involved in a car crash that left her brain dead.