Isabel Dalhousie is a moral philosopher by profession. She edits a journal on the subject. One of the most intriguing aspects of this series is that she’s always weighing the moral shoulds and shouldn’ts of her circumstances and her cases. What is her obligation to act? To speak? To pursue? Insatiably curious, her habit makes these books ripe with meaning. Set in a charming Edinburgh, between her bassoon-playing friend Jamie, her no-nonsense, Spiritualist housekeeper, Grace, and her slightly wild, deli-owning niece, Cat, Isabel has her hands and her mind full navigating what’s right, what’s wrong, and what’s in-between. Her constant self-scrutiny is part of what caused me to be as transparent as I am about the metaphysics in my own books.

I love fictional spiritual books about mediums and tarot cards, and this book has it all.

The lead character is an out-of-work actress who takes a second job at a metaphysical shop, only to find out she is more psychic than the other employees who work there.

It's fun, exciting, and has lots of spooky twists. 

Mention has often been made of the extent to which Marshall McLuhan was a devout adherent of the Catholic faith. But little has been known about how he viewed the place of religion in the world particularly with reference to the fate of the Catholic Church. This carefully selected collection of McLuhan’s writings on religion provides one with clarifying insights into his views on a broad range of Church-related issues including the nature of conversion, the spiritualism of youth, the impact of technology on liturgy, and Vatican II.  Overall, by revealing that McLuhan viewed faith as a sense, the volume illuminates the connections he made between religion and media.  

Training as a psychologist, I read Leon Festinger’s study “When Prophecy Fails” describing his research study infiltrating a doomsday cult whose believers expected to be rescued by flying saucers from the planet Clarion. Alison Lurie then novelised this scenario in Imaginary Friends. Here we meet a parade of oddballs: psychologists whose everyday normality is deceit, pretending to be delusional themselves, spying on other’s lives: a group of pious, well-meaning souls awaiting extra-terrestrial salvation: a cult leader who receives and relays the group’s alien guidance: the lead researcher who claims to be possessed by the spirit of “Ro of Varna”.

It’s a deft and clever satire that shows the conventions of oddness, and the oddness of conventions.

The Subjugated Beast begins with a classic Gothic setup: an inheritance clause compels a young woman, Curl, to live in the gloomy Castle Grim with her Uncle Paul and Aunt Beatrice.

Holed up in that castle, the impotent and monomaniacal Paul subjects Beatrice to a perverse scientific experiment, wherein she is forced to subsist solely on raw meat. Paul hopes that over time this diet will unlock the woman’s inner beast, a property he believes thrives “deep beneath the undisputed consciousness of each of us.”

Ryan writes in lucidly vivid prose and demonstrates full mastery of plot, character, and atmosphere. Her novel is replete with fascinating reflections on many of horror’s pervading philosophical concerns, such as knowledge and its limitations, science versus spiritualism, and evil as something innate or external.   

This is the dirty realist poet, Charles Bukowski's, last novel and is filled with intriguing code and name-dropping of people he knew and was influenced by. As well as being as poetic as hell. Pulp also gives a glimpse of what it might have been like if Bukowski had lived on and ventured fully into crime fiction or pulp noir.

I love the book’s surface-level simplicity to draw you into its world. However, it then subversively lets bigger themes creep in: including surrealism and spiritualism, as the author faces his own death. All this with Bukowski’s deftly poetic touches.

This showed me how semi-autobiographical elements can fuse and influence fiction and vice versa. And, that it doesn't have to be hard to absorb or distract from the story. By acknowledging layers in writing which are there for those who want to peel back and discover them. And when they don’t,… show more.

This book leaves you feeling close to your loved ones on ‘the other side of the veil,’ as if they are but a breath away.

Sherrie Dillard is a psychic medium with an amazing ability to connect with people who have died. Her stories show how love is stronger than death and that an entire world is going on that we’re unaware of. She describes how important it is to know that our loved ones still communicate with us. She also has exercises and meditations to help you continue with your own soul’s journey.

While James Van Praagh’s book titled Unfinished Business: What the Dead Can Teach Us About Life is not strictly dealing with reincarnation, but rather, what those who have passed over want us to know, it is founded on the same principle—that life and death are not about punishment and reward but compassion and love. Told on a case-by-case basis, the book aims a spotlight on just how important our earthly relationships are. And those souls, who have moved out of their bodies, are determined to have their messages heard, whether to right wrongs, settle debts, or, as in most cases, to ask for simple forgiveness from those they wronged on earth.

I was deeply moved by Poor Your Soul, Mira Ptacin’s beautifully-wrought memoir about the grief of losing first her brother, and then her unborn child. So I knew I was in good hands when I opened her engaging, compassionate portrait of the denizens of Camp Etna, the once-famous epicenter of the American Spiritualist movement. Shifting seamlessly between the settlement’s grand history in the late 1800s and its more modest 21st-century existence, Ptacin profiles psychics and mediums of all stripes, and reports on her own experiences of the paranormal with humor, intelligence, and grace. 

I loved how this book had me anticipating what the next cryptic messages from Billy would mean. Those 'aha moments' were awesome. Spirit messages are not always straight forward. They can see into our future and share things with us that haven't happened so nothing makes sense.

I've experienced this so many times in my work as a medium and animal communicator. Deparated humans and pets delivered messages that none of us understood at the time of our session, however, I often heard back later that the circumstances became perfectly clear and played out exactly as predicted.

It is a heartwarming, fun, and witty look into the connections and bonds we share with our loved ones.