What happens after death? It’s a question that occurs to all of us at one time or another. And just about every religion and faith seem to have an answer.

Author, teacher of neuroscience, and Guggenheim Fellow David Eagleman presents a wide variety of possibilities in SUM: FORTY TALES FROM THE AFTERLIVES. Will we find that God is actually a microbe entirely unaware of our existence? Are we simply background characters in the dreams of the living after we die? Will we relive all of our lives grouped by the amount of time we spend doing various activities? (Years spent crying followed by years of nothing but kissing.) Will the various versions of ourselves all exist simultaneously, and we realize how little we have in common with our younger and older personifications?

I really liked this slim volume of vignettes about the ultimate unknown. Some versions are clever and cerebral, others mystifying or funny. The one that lingers the longest in my memory is the version of the afterlife that is essentially a waiting room where our souls linger until our names are no longer spoken by the living. Is it a blessing or a curse to be immortalized in human history?