A fusion of medical thriller and speculative SF, Morgan’s debut novel chronicles the struggles of the first person to survive a “corporeal” transplant.

Roger Scully is a Denver-based doctor who, while still grieving his wife’s recent death, is involved in a gruesome car accident in Tibet that crushes everything below his navel. A radical surgical procedure (called a hemicorporectomy) performed by doctors in the Chinese city of Chengdu saves Scully’s life but leaves him severely disabled and with serious concerns about quality-of-life after he recovers from essentially losing half his body. Approached with the opportunity to have his brain transplanted into an otherwise healthy but dead donor (a prisoner sentenced to death who donated his body), Scully agrees—and awakens after surgery in the body of a Chinese man, who is of Uighur descent. Essentially forced to live under the assumed identity of Wu Zicheng to keep his identity secret, Scully thrives. He resumes his career interning at the center that saved his life and falls in love with a senior medical student named Zhou Lushan who helped facilitate his recovery. But problems arise when Scully realizes he wants to move back to the United States and resume his medical career there since Robert Scully may be officially dead. His life becomes even more complicated when, after a BBC interview with him goes viral, his true identity is discovered and he becomes a divisive figure worldwide. Is he a shining example of what modern medicine can do, or is he the product of unethical scientific experimentation? Many significant issues are examined in Scully’s strange journey of enlightenment—xenophobia and racism (particularly the Uighurs’ treatment in China)—but perhaps the most profoundly disturbing issue is America’s donor organ crisis (“Every day, in the United States, seventeen people die awaiting a transplant”). The novel’s writing is fluid, the pacing brisk throughout, and the characters are well developed. The one (major) criticism is the lack of a satisfying conclusion. Readers may be left decidedly underwhelmed.

A wildly thought-provoking, albeit flawed, work that raises numerous ethical considerations.