Alive and Beating

By Rebecca Wolf

Arbitrary Books, 2025

244 pages, $29.95

Imagine you need an organ transplant and are waiting desperately for one to become available. You know that only a tragedy for someone else will save you. The list of those needing transplants is far longer than the potential number of donor organs. So those in charge have created a protocol for determining where someone is placed on the recipient list. It’s difficult for everyone.

Alive and Beating, journalist Rebecca Wolf’s debut novel, puts the reader inside this challenging situation. Through six interconnected stories, Rebecca Wolf depicts the lives of seven characters who need transplants (heart, lungs, liver, pancreas, and kidney transplants, respectively). They come from diverse racial, ethnic, religious, and economic groups and yet this fraught experience levels their differences. We get to know each patient and their family as they go on with their lives as well as they can. They are brave and resilient but also understandably impatient and under great stress. Wolf depicts their back story and present circumstances as the clock ticks away relentlessly. We observe the impact the situation is having on the patient and their family and how it leads to an increased appreciation of life in all its complexity. We also experience their desperate desire to live a normal life, both in terms of quality of life and longevity.

Leah is 22 and needs a kidney. She has led a sheltered life, but her situation opens the door to a wider world. Yael, 35, has cystic fibrosis and needs a new set of lungs. She has a young daughter and has been living with her parents. Hoda, 38, is a widow with two young sons who owns a salon and is waiting for a kidney to become available. David is dying from liver disease; his wife runs their small restaurant with the help of Yael’s mother. Severin is a priest with severe diabetes who needs a pancreas. He is questioning his calling and pondering the possibilities if he receives a transplant and a second lease on life. He is friends with Yael’s father, a cab driver. Finally, we meet two teenage boys who need a heart transplant. They are from different social circles but become best friends while sharing a hospital room. When a heart becomes available, their doctors must choose which one will receive it and which will have to wait a little while longer.

The prologue depicts the terrible event that leads to organs becoming available. Then we meet the characters who will benefit from the death of the victim. Minor characters appear in several stories, serving as connective tissue between their lives, and some key characters show up occasionally as well. Wolf shows us how those who live in this city of just over a million people are connected, sometimes in unexpected ways. Each story was completely absorbing, as well as informative. You will also learn about the city and country in which they live, which is a character in itself. There is joy and heartbreak in these pages. Highly recommended.