Matilda Wilding’s The Waiting List is a haunting meditation on motherhood, mortality, and the unbearable calculus of survival. With quiet intensity, Wilding invites us into the fragile world of Liv—a woman on the cusp of new life, yet tethered to the edge of death by a failing heart.

The novel’s premise is devastatingly simple: Liv needs a transplant, and time is running out. But what begins as a story of medical urgency deepens into something far more unsettling—a psychological reckoning with the ethics of desire, the weight of maternal love, and the unthinkable choices we make when faced with extinction. The titular list becomes more than names—it’s a ledger of hope and guilt, a mirror reflecting Liv’s desperation and the dark corners of human instinct.

Wilding’s prose is elegant and restrained, allowing emotion to rise naturally from the silences between words. The tension is not driven by plot twists, but by moral ambiguity and the slow erosion of certainty. Liv is rendered with aching clarity—her longing to protect her son, her fear of absence, and the quiet horror of imagining a life bought at someone else’s expense.

This is a novel that lingers. It asks not just whose life matters most, but how we live with the answer. A powerful, thought-provoking debut that balances literary grace with emotional gravity.

With thanks to Matilda Wilding, the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC.