If the Spirit Moves You

It's been four years since Ruth Picardie died of cancer aged 32. She wrote about the last months of her life in a collection of articles for the Observer magazine (then edited by her sister, Justine). These were subsequently turned into a book, Before I Say Goodbye. Now it is Justine's turn, and she has produced that rare thing: a memoir of bereavement that is joky, ironic and utterly lacking in self-indulgence.

Her eagerness to re-establish contact with Ruth leads her to try every psychic method going, with varying levels of success - one medium reports that her grandmother thinks she should tidy up and her sister wants her to eat more Marmite. By the end, she has begun to come to terms with her loss in a gradual, unresolved way that is always convincingly charted. It is candid but never queasy, learned but never pompous, moving but never mawkish.