When journalist Justine Picardie lost her sister Ruth to breast cancer in 2000, she yearned to conjure a voice from the vast silence, to fill the space left by her sister's absence. Over the years that followed, she sought out psychics, mediums, and an array of ancient and modern methods of contacting the other side. It was a year filled with skepticism and belief, emotion and intellect, darkness and light-a personal and sometimes painful search for the afterlife in an age of reason.