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Winner of the The Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2017
WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017
A STORY OF LOVE AFTER DEATH
'A masterpiece' Zadie Smith
'Extraordinary' Daily Mail
'Breathtaking' Observer
'A tour de force' Sunday Times
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?
Published | 28 May 2021 |
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Format | Paperback |
Edition | 1st |
Extent | 368 |
ISBN | 9781526602022 |
Imprint | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Dimensions | 198 x 129 mm |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
George Saunders's brilliant debut novel about a grieving Lincoln confirms him as a literary star … To read Saunders's fiction is to be dazzled by ingenuity, imagination and searing comic verve ... A tender but trenchant reminder that America is and always has been many-voiced: not one story, but millions
Sunday Times
Death haunts us, and in Lincoln in the Bardo George Saunders mines the many ways it does: the Gothic, the sentimental, the fearful and, above all, the grief-stricken
Joan Bakewell, New Statesman, Books of the Year 2017
I was impressed but challenged by the originality and scope of George Saunders's Booker-winning story of grief and empathy, Lincoln in the Bardo
Gordon Brown, Guardian, Best Books of 2017
A luminous feat of generosity and humanism… Such is Saunders's magnificent portraiture that readers will recognize in this wretchedness and bravery aspects of their own characters as well
Colson Whitehead, New York Times
The most strange and brilliant book you'll read this year … Riotously imagined ... So intimate and human, so profound, that it seems like an act of grace
Financial Times
A historical novel that hews deeply and movingly to archival fact while also being an all-out crazy spectacle of his own invention ... A puzzling, hilarious vortex of invention that only Saunders could pull off. The novel made me feel intimate with Lincoln, and that particular moment of history, in a way I never had before
Jennifer Egan, Guardian, Best Books of 2017
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