Sum

Sum is a collection of short imagined tales, each one a different version of what might happen after death. The afterlives are strange, and many are comic. In one, God is the size of a microbe and has no idea the dead person exists. In another, the only people present are those the dead person remembers.

Other afterlives treat the self as something that can be taken apart or rebuilt. In one, a person is divided into every age they ever were. In another, they are recreated from their credit card records. In a third, they must share their time with irritating versions of themselves that represent the lives they might have led.

The book is fiction, but its stories draw on science, and on romance and a sense of awe at the mystery of existing at all. The tone moves between funny, wistful and unsettling, sometimes within a single piece. Hope, love and death recur as subjects, and each tale approaches human nature from an unexpected angle.

Eagleman upends familiar ideas about what comes after life and uses that to look at how people live now. The format suits dipping in: each tale is its own small premise, and the whole reads as a series of thought experiments about identity, memory and meaning.