If the Spirit Moves You

If the Spirit Moves You is the story of life after death—it chronicles a year in the life of Justine Picardie after the death of her sister, her soul mate, from breast cancer. It tells of the yearning to conjure a voice from the vast silence, of how we fill the space that appears when someone dies, or how the space fills itself, of the bond of sisters that, like an endless conversation, carries on.

Told in a series of diary entries from Good Friday to Easter Sunday a year later, the book is filled with significant characters from the author’s life—her Jewish academic father, who searches for answers to life’s existential questions in the Kabbalah; her Catholic therapist mother; her husband, her children—as well as the spiritualists she encounters and their machines that speak to the dead.

A search for the afterlife in the age of reason, If the Spirit Moves You is poignant and bracing, cosmic and uplifting, all at once.