SUNDAY TIMES, NEW STATESMAN and TLS BOOKS OF THE YEAR

At the heart of all human experience lies our obsession with death. For many years we turned to religion for answers, but with the twentieth century came ideas from evolution and politics to suggest that our lives - and afterlives - were in our own hands. Such ideas went on to have both trivial and terrible effects: from a sweeping craze of séances to the mass-murders of the Stalinist terror.

Gray raises vital questions about the "truths" science can offer, the technology we are still exploiting for immortality - and exactly what it means to be human.