Rachel Clarke & Mark Haddon in conversation about their latest books.
The Story of a Heart
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.
Rachel Clarke
Rachel Clarke is a British writer and physician, specialising in palliative and end of life care and working in a large NHS hospital. She is the author of Breathtaking, an account of working inside the NHS during the UK's first wave of COVID-19, a work that formed the basis of a TV series of the same name.
Dogs and Monsters
The bestselling author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time weaves ancient fables into fresh, unexpected forms and forges new unforgettable legends.
The myth of the Minotaur in his labyrinth is turned into a wrenching parable of maternal love - and of the monstrosities of patriarchy.
The lover of a goddess, Tithonus, is gifted eternal life but without eternal youth.
Actaeon, changed into a stag after glimpsing the naked Diana and torn to pieces by his hunting dogs, becomes a visceral metaphor about how humans use and misuse animals.
From genetic engineering to the eternal complications of family, Haddon showcases how we are subject to the same elemental forces that obsessed the Greeks, as he reimagines stories from Laika the Soviet space dog on her fateful orbit to St Anthony wrestling with loneliness in the desert.
Mark Haddon
Mark Haddon is an English novelist, best known for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. He won the Whitbread Award, the Dolly Gray Children's Literature Award, the Guardian Prize, and a Commonwealth Writers' Prize for his work.