Gripping tale of life and friendship after death

During one late-summer week in 2003, two teenage boys, both mad keen on football, computer games and girls, lost their lives. They had never met, having spent their 16 years living hundreds of miles apart.

Yet through a combination of cutting-edge technology, superhuman skill and, most important of all, an act of immense generosity, one of these boys brought the other back to life. On August 29, Martin Burton’s heart was transplanted into Marc McCay’s chest cavity and, within minutes, the grey body on the operating table that was being kept alive by a machine pump started to turn pink. Two months later Marc was able to leave hospital and begin his recovery.

In this gripping book, so powerfully emotional that at times I had to put it down to wipe my eyes, More writer Cole Moreton turns the narrative of a single organ into a story of thrilling adventure and selfless empathy.

In unfussy prose he retraces the terrible events of August 2003 that felled two fit boys within days of each other.

First there is Martin, a gentle 16-year-old from Grantham who knocks on his mother’s bedroom door in the middle of the night, gasps that he has a headache, and falls dead to the floor with a sudden brain haemorrhage.

Then there is Marc, an athletic 15-year-old from outside Glasgow, who returns from a holiday in Spain with a terrible ache in his guts. Within hours, it is apparent that Marc has picked up a virus that has attacked his heart. All his major organs are shutting down.

Moreton doesn’t need to pile on the tension – it is there as Marc’s parents wait anxiously for the donor organ that will save their boy’s life. We ride in the ambulance with them, sit by the bed in the ICU, and cheer when, after days in an induced coma, Marc receives Martin’s heart and begins to come back from the dead.

What makes this story so special, though, is what happens next. Against all of the advice and most of the rules, the mothers of the two boys track each other down and begin a correspondence.

Linda McCay is worried that Susan Burton will resent her for having a son still living.

Susan is anxious that she will seem like a figure of perpetual reproach. In fact, the two women forge a deep bond.

So much so that when the families do finally meet, Susan is able to place her hand flat on Marc’s chest and feel her Martin’s heart beating, the one part of him that is still alive.

Moreton admits that he started this project feeling queasy about the whole business of organ donorship and, in particular, whether he should carry a card.

By the end of the book, and having put readers through an emotionally draining twist, Moreton leaves us in no doubt about where our moral duty lies.

His story of Martin Burton, the boy who gave his heart away, and Marc McCay, the lucky boy he gave it to, is a wonderful mixture of patient investigation, delicate storytelling and campaigning journalism.