All That Really Matters: A Novel

High-stakes surgeries. Moral dilemmas. A love story on life support. All That Really Matters delivers the intensity of a medical drama with the heart of a romance. Are you ready to scrub in?

Joe Bosco is an arrogant, hard-charging transplant surgeon whose ambition knows no bounds. He pursues his job with a take no prisoners approach and saving patients is not just his job, or even his passion—it’s his religion. After doing his surgical residency, he passes on a job offer from Stanford, instead taking a position at a private hospital in San Francisco which pays Joe an exorbitant salary and where the bottom line is…the bottom line. Joe leaves behind academic medicine, much to the chagrin of his father— a German Jewish Holocaust survivor who is a world-renowned neuroscientist and Nobel Prize winner—and his girlfriend, Kate, who sees Joe turning into a different man than the one she met at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Bosco makes it to the top as a star in the transplant world but soon realizes that the new world he inhabits is fraught with moral and ethical transgressions, some his partners commit and, eventually, some he commits. When the hospital administration sides against Joe in an operating room catastrophe, he is isolated, left with a career in shambles, a girlfriend who wants nothing to do with him, and a father who can’t hide his disappointment. It is not until his life spins out of control that Joe must come to terms with his own failings and find his true purpose in life…in the most unlikely of places.