David Wagner

The phone rings a little after two. A man answers,and a voice at the other end says, “We’ve got a liver for you.” This is the call he’s been waiting for. The call he’s been dreading. Now he has to decide if he’s going to go ahead, if only for the sake of his child. He picks up his bag and heads to the hospital. Life is the story of an organ transplant, and of what went on before. Of a patient’s countless days and nights in hospital and the never-ending string of patients he shares his room with, of their stories and confessions. And lying on his bed, that white spaceship with which he travels through the space of his memories and dreams, his thoughts constantly return to one all-consuming question: who is there worth living for? What difference has his life made? Who died so that he could live on, maybe as a different person than he was? David Wagner’s moving and brilliantly written book describes a momentously existential inner journey through responsibility and happiness, death and love; it is a work of exhilarating scope and at the same time a meticulous, unflinching study of the human condition.