After the incredible success of her off-kilter best-selling debut book Stiff, Spook has author Mary Roach return with a book that deals with a subject just as seemingly bizarre: what happens to the supposed human soul after death? Roach approaches the topic with her usual combination of wry humor, skepticism, but a genuine desire to know and understand the various efforts and methods scientists, believers, and scientists who believe have employed in order to discover, study, and obtain scientific evidence of the afterlife. She interviews both scientists and mediums, goes to school for mediums and subjects her brain to electromagnetic waves in order to see ghosts, and embarks on a journey to record the sounds made by the Donner party. Like her previous book, Spook is littered with footnotes that begin to take a life of their own, usually tangential but always utterly fascinating.

Read an interview with Mary Roach in The Book Standard.