The Life or Death Committee

Who has the right to live? Who should decide?

Bestselling author Jillian Medoff explores the human cost of impossible choices in a dazzling novel inspired by a controversial true story. 

In 1961, dialysis could save lives, but it was available only to a handful of patients. That summer, seven Seattle citizens—a pastor, a surgeon, a lawyer, a labor leader, a housewife, a banker, and a city official—were asked to perform an unprecedented act of public service. Privately known as the “Life-or-Death Committee,” their task was to decide which gravely ill patients would receive this groundbreaking treatmenteat—and which would be denied. 

Within the committee’s closed world, each member carries private burdens. Among them: a beloved councilman with a devastating secret; a housewife starved for purpose; a pastor haunted by his father’s violence; and a surgeon who returned from the Korean War unable to feel. As hidden connections emerge and loyalties shift, their fragile alliance is threatened by scrutiny from Life magazine and the compromises they have made in the name of fairness. 

With uncanny psychological insight and gripping narrative force, Medoff confronts urgent questions of responsibility, conscience, and what it means to be a good person. Sweeping yet intimate, The Life or Death Committee is an ambitious novel about secrecy, moral judgment, and the choices that bind us to one another and forever alter how we understand ourselves. 

BEHIND THE BOOK

Learn how Jillian discovered the real Life-or-Death Committee, researched its history, and transformed that real-life story into fiction. Read the Author’s Note.

EARLY PRAISE

The Life or Death Committee is a deep dive into the relationship between power and empathy. To read this book is to imagine yourself at the committee table, with the ability to help only a small number of those in critical need. Scene after scene, the question resurfaces: What would you do? I loved this bold, complex, character-driven novel.  – Patrick Ryan, NY Times bestselling author of Buckeye

The Life or Death Committee is the story of impossible choices made by ordinary people. Jillian Medoff has built us a gorgeous historical treasure box of a book. Expansive and intricate all at once, this depiction of a rapidly changing healthcare system and the people at its center is a propulsive examination of what morality really means when you’re deciding the fate of a neighbor.  – Lily Brooks-Dalton, critically acclaimed, bestselling author of The Light Pirate and Ruins

Beautifully written and full of suspense, The Life or Death Committee tells a captivating, powerful, and deeply human story about the agonizing moral consequences of our decisions. Jillian Medoff has revealed a forgotten chapter of twentieth-century American culture with compassion and a masterful command of storytelling.  – Bruce Holsinger, bestselling author of Culpability (Oprah’s Book Club)