Lincoln in the Bardo

Description

By George Saunders

February 1862. The Civil War is less than a year old, and President Lincoln’s eleven-year-old son Willie dies and is laid in a Georgetown crypt. Newspapers report that the grieving president returned to the cemetery alone, at night, to hold the body.

Saunders sets the novel in the single night that follows, in the bardo, the Tibetan term for the state between death and what comes next, narrated by a crowd of the cemetery’s dead who will not admit they have died. Winner of the Booker Prize.

First published 2017