Lincoln in the Bardo

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017

A NO. 1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 

The extraordinary first novel by the bestselling, Folio Prize-winning, National Book Award-shortlisted George Saunders, about Abraham Lincoln and the death of his eleven year old son, Willie, at the dawn of the Civil War.

The American Civil War rages while President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son lies gravely ill. In a matter of days, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns to the crypt several times alone to hold his boy’s body.

From this seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of realism, entering a thrilling, supernatural domain both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself trapped in a transitional realm – called, in Tibetan tradition, the bardo – and as ghosts mingle, squabble, gripe and commiserate, and stony tendrils creep towards the boy, a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul.

Unfolding over a single night, Lincoln in the Bardo is written with George Saunders’ inimitable humour, pathos and grace. Here he invents an exhilarating new form, and is confirmed as one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Deploying a theatrical, kaleidoscopic panoply of voices – living and dead, historical and fictional – Lincoln in the Bardo poses a timeless question: how do we live and love when we know that everything we hold dear must end?

 ‘George Saunders’s brilliant debut novel about a grieving Lincoln confirms him as a literary star’ The Sunday Times

 ‘Extraordinary and moving … It would be an understatement to call this novel an extraordinary tour de force’ The Sunday Times

‘Lincoln in the Bardo is part-historical novel, part-carnivalesque phantasmagoria. It may well be the most strange and brilliant book you’ll read this year’ Financial Times

 ‘As you turn the pages of this remarkable novel it starts to feel uncannily like a hinge in American history’  The Times

 ‘A historical novel like no other – a supernatural ensemble extravaganza of awesome intricacy’ Telegraph

‘Lincoln in the Bardo is a performance of great formal daring … it stands head and shoulders above most contemporary fiction, showing a writer who is expanding his universe outwards, and who clearly has many more pleasures to offer his readers’ Hari Kunzru Guardian 

 ‘Saunders conjures a breathtakingly agile narrative … His first novel is a brilliant, exhausting, emotionally involving attempt to get up again, to fight for empathy, kindness and self-sacrifice and to resist’ Observer