“Abraham Lincoln's eleven-year-old son Willie dies of typhoid fever in February 1862 and Lincoln returns to the Georgetown cemetery that night. The Bardo (the Tibetan-Buddhist liminal state between death and reincarnation) is populated by the cemetery's reluctant dead. Man Booker Prize 2017.”
What's in this book
- George Saunders's 2017 debut novel - Abraham Lincoln visits his eleven-year-old son's grave on the night of his death
- Man Booker Prize winner 2017; the structurally most ambitious American novel of the 2010s
- 368 pages of chorus-of-the-dead construction with one hundred sixty-six named Bardo voices
- Set in the Georgetown cemetery during the early years of the Civil War
- 166-voice ensemble audiobook (Nick Offerman, David Sedaris, Megan Mullally, Carrie Brownstein, more) is the definitive audio production
- For readers of Tenth of December, The Underground Railroad, and contemporary structurally ambitious literary fiction
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Lincoln in the Bardo is George Saunders's 2017 debut novel, the Man Booker Prize winner and the structurally ambitious historical-experimental novel that established Saunders's reputation outside the short-story-collection world he had built across the previous twenty years. The setting is the Georgetown cemetery on the night of February 22, 1862, the night after Abraham Lincoln's eleven-year-old son Willie has died of typhoid fever. The Bardo (the Tibetan-Buddhist liminal state between death and reincarnation, repurposed by Saunders into a kind of cemetery purgatory) is populated by the cemetery's reluctant dead, who refuse to recognize their own deaths and have remained there for years and decades. Lincoln visits the crypt that night to hold his son's body. The novel runs the next several hours through several dozen Bardo voices and contemporary archival fragments.
Saunders's structural method is the chorus-of-the-dead construction (more than one hundred sixty named Bardo characters across the novel, each rendered in short first-person fragments) interspersed with historical-archival material from the actual 1862 historical record (real and fictional contemporary newspaper accounts, memoirs, and biographies all formatted in the same prose register, with deliberate disagreement among the sources about what the weather was like that night). The Bardo-character voices (the Reverend Everly Thomas, the recently dead printer Hans Vollman, the suicidal young man roger bevins iii) operate as the structural emotional center. The Lincoln chapters in the middle third are some of the strongest contemporary American literary prose about presidential grief.
Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the right Saunders novel entry point (start with the Tenth of December short story collection if you have not yet), and as one of the canonical contemporary American novels about grief. Read A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (2021) for Saunders's writing-craft lectures. The 166-voice ensemble audiobook (Nick Offerman, David Sedaris, Megan Mullally, Don Cheadle, Carrie Brownstein, and more than one hundred sixty others) is one of the most ambitious audio productions in contemporary American publishing. Five stars without reservation.
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