#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
The “devastatingly moving” (People) first novel from the author of Tenth of December: 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
One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years • One of Paste’s Best Novels of the Decade
“[Lincoln in the Bardo] demonstrates that even the unspeakable—civil war, familial grief—can be named through a close, humanizing narrative voice.”—Amanda Gorman for Time, “25 Books That Capture This American Moment"
February 1862. With the Civil War less than one year old, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, 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, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy’s body. From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story that breaks free of its realistic framework into a thrilling, supernatural realm, deploying a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices—living and dead, historical and invented—to ask a timeless question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end?
Named One of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post, USA Today, and Maureen Corrigan, NPR • One of Time’s Ten Best Novels of the Year • One of O: The Oprah Magazine’s Best Books of the Year
George Saunders is the author of eight books, including the story collections
Pastoralia and
Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2006 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2013 he was awarded the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and was included in
Time’s list of the one hundred most influential people in the world. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.
“A luminous feat of generosity and humanism.”
—Colson Whitehead, The New York Times Book Review“Grief guts us all, but rarely has it been elucidated with such nuance and brilliance as in Saunders’s Civil War phantasmagoria. Heartrending yet somehow hilarious, Saunders’s zinger of an allegory holds a mirror to our perilous current moment.”
—O: The Oprah Magazine “An extended national ghost story . . . As anyone who knows Saunders’s work would expect, his first novel is a strikingly original production.”
—The Washington Post “Saunders’s beautifully realized portrait of Lincoln . . . attests to the author’s own fruitful transition from the short story to the long-distance form of the novel.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “Profound, funny and vital . . . the work of a great writer.”
—Chicago Tribune “Heartbreaking and hilarious . . . For all its divine comedy,
Lincoln in the Bardo is also deep and moving.”
—USA Today “Along with the wonderfully bizarre, empathy abounds in
Lincoln in the Bardo.”
—Time “There are moments that are almost transcendentally beautiful, that will come back to you on the edge of sleep. And it is told in beautifully realized voices, rolling out with precision or with stream-of-consciousness drawl.”
—NPR “
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 “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 “A brilliant, Buddhist reimagining of an American story of great loss and great love . . . Saunders has written an unsentimental novel of Shakespearean proportions, gorgeously stuffed with tragic characters, bawdy humor, terrifying visions, throat-catching tenderness, and a galloping narrative, all twined around the luminous cord connecting a father and son and backlit by a nation engulfed in fire.”
—Elle “Wildly imaginative.”
—Marie Claire “Mesmerizing . . . Dantesque . . . A haunting American ballad.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Exhilarating . . . Ruthless and relentless in its evocation not only of Lincoln and his quandary, but also of the tenuous existential state shared by all of us.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “It’s unlike anything you’ve ever read, except that the grotesque humor, pathos, and, ultimately, human kindness at its core mark it as a work that could come only from Saunders.”
—The National
