By Randy Gener



Lincoln in the Bardo
A Novel
By GEORGE SAUNDERS

Penguin Random House  | 3689 Pages
Category: Literary Fiction | Historical Fiction

READ AN EXCERPT

BUY HERE

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER


NEW YORK CITY |  George Saunders has produced a winner. This long-awaited first novel from the author of Tenth of December tells a moving and original father-son story featuring none other than Abraham Lincoln, as well as an unforgettable cast of supporting characters, living and dead, historical and invented.

February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.” Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy’s body.

From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state—called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo—a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul.

Lincoln in the Bardo is an astonishing feat of imagination and a bold step forward from one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Formally daring, generous in spirit, deeply concerned with matters of the heart, it is a testament to fiction’s ability to speak honestly and powerfully to the things that really matter to us. Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end?


GEORGE SAUNDERS is the author of two short-story collections, Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award. His work has received two National Magazine Awards and three times been included in O. Henry Awards collections. In 1999 he was chosen by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers age forty and under. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.


PRAISE FOR LINCOLN IN THE BARDO

“A luminous feat of generosity and humanism.”—Colson Whitehead, The New York Times Book Review

“A masterpiece.”—Zadie Smith

“Ingenious . . . Saunders—well on his way toward becoming a twenty-first-century Twain—crafts an American patchwork of love and loss, giving shape to our foundational sorrows.”—Vogue

“Saunders is the most humane American writer working today.”—Harper’s Magazine

“The novel beats with a present-day urgency—a nation at war with itself, the unbearable grief of a father who has lost a child, and a howling congregation of ghosts, as divided in death as in life, unwilling to move on.”—Vanity Fair

Advertisements