My Sister's Keeper

My Sister's Keeper is a novel by the American writer Jodi Picoult, published in 2004. It was her eleventh novel, and it was later adapted for film.

Anna Fitzgerald has spent her childhood in hospitals, donating what her sister Kate needed as Kate's acute leukaemia kept returning. She was conceived for that purpose, which her parents have never hidden from her, and by the time she is thirteen the sequence of donations has reached the point where the next one is a kidney and the operation carries risks for both sisters. Anna's answer is to find a lawyer and petition for medical emancipation, which means taking her family to court. Picoult tells the story from several points of view, including Anna's, her mother's, her brother's and the lawyer's, so the same decisions are seen from the position of the person making them and the people who have to live with them. The book's argument is about what a family owes its members, and it keeps the medical facts and the legal procedure close enough to the surface that the debate is conducted in concrete terms.

Picoult has said the idea came from a news story about a family with a similar situation, and the novel is written for a general readership rather than as a medical or legal treatise.