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The best-selling author of Stiff  and Bonk trains her considerable wit and curiosity on the human soul.

"What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's that—the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my lap-top?" In an attempt to find out, Mary Roach brings her tireless curiosity to bear on an array of contemporary and historical soul-searchers: scientists, schemers, engineers, mediums, all trying to prove (or disprove) that life goes on after we die.

The general reader’s ideal emissary to the arcana of serious science. . . . Roach’s writing has what science has so far failed to find: a divine spark.
— Malcolm Jones

Dependably witty, especially when it ventures far into the ether. . . . [Roach] makes a clever investigator and a thoroughly entertaining, if skeptical, tour guide.
— Janet Maslin

Investigative reporting has no lighter, more irreverent spirit than Mary Roach. . . . Spook is enormous fun.

— David A Walton

Surreal, fascinating, at times absurd and always hilarious, Mary Roach may not reveal the street address of our final destination, but in Spook she makes it sound less like a morgue and more like a comedy club.

— Vince Darcangelo

Reading Spook is like attending a lecture by a professor who is equal parts Groucho Marx and Stephen Jay Gould, both enlightening and entertaining.

— Dorman T. Schindler

Mary Roach is the author of Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, and Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. Her writing has appeared in Outside, Wired, National Geographic, and the New York Times Magazine, among others. She lives in Oakland, California.