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Read the 2025 Women’s Prize Non-Fiction Winner!
The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke is the winner of the 2025 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction. Interweaving two intimate family stories, we meet nine-year old Kiera who dies following a catastrophic car accident and Max, also nine-years old, who faces imminent heart failure due to a viral infection. The Story of a Heart is a clear-sighted, vital exploration into the human experience behind organ donation. Inspiring, profoundly moving and insightful, it celebrates both an indefatigable respect for life, the generosity and tenacity of the human spirit and the sheer miracle of modern science.
‘The Story of a Heart’ by Rachel Clarke
The Story of a Heart
Rachel Clarke
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The first of our organs to form, the last to die, the heart is both a simple pump and the symbol of all that makes us human: as long as it continues to beat, we hope.
One summer day, nine-year-old Keira suffered catastrophic injuries in a car accident. Though her brain and the rest of her body began to shut down, her heart continued to beat. In an act of extraordinary generosity, Keira’s parents and siblings agreed that she would have wanted to be an organ donor. Meanwhile nine-year-old Max had been hospitalised for nearly a year with a virus that was causing his young heart to fail. When Max’s parents received the call they had been hoping for, they knew it came at a terrible cost to another family.
This is the unforgettable story of how one family’s grief transformed into a lifesaving gift. With tremendous compassion and clarity, Dr Rachel Clarke relates the urgent journey of Keira’s heart and explores the history of the remarkable medical innovations that made it possible, stretching back over a century and involving the knowledge and dedication not just of surgeons but of countless physicians, immunologists, nurses and scientists.
The Story of a Heart is a testament to compassion for the dying, the many ways we honour our loved ones, and the tenacity of love.
About the Author
Before going to medical school, Dr Rachel Clarke was a television journalist and documentary maker. She now specialises in palliative medicine, caring deeply about helping patients live the end of their lives as fully and richly as possible – and in the power of human stories to build empathy and inspire change.
Rachel is the author of three Sunday Times bestselling books. Breathtaking reveals what life was really like inside the NHS during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic last year. Dear Life, shortlisted for the 2020 Costa Biography Award and long-listed for the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize, is based on her work in a hospice. It explores love, loss, grief, dying and what really matters at the end of life. Your Life in My Hands documents life as a junior doctor on the NHS frontline.
Book Details:
Published: October 2025
ISBN: 9780349145600
Format: Trade Paperback
Page extent: 288 pages
