Strange things begin to happen when Mrs. Shimfissle, an eighty-year-old woman, falls out of a fig tree in her own front yard, in a novel about one woman's offbeat experiences in the hereafter.

"Near-death experiences are controversial. Thousands of people have had them, but many in the scientific community have argued that they are impossible. Dr. Eben Alexander was one of those people. A highly trained neurosurgeon, Alexander knew that what people of faith call the "soul" is really a product of brain chemistry. NDEs, he would have been the first to explain, might feel real, but they are fantasies produced by brains under extreme stress....

"For years as an award-winning war reporter, Sebastian Junger traveled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. And yet the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home he shared with his wife and two young children. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by...