Lincoln in the Bardo
by George Saunders
The recap
In February 1862, with the Civil War grinding on, eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln died of typhoid fever in the White House. Newspapers of the time reported that the grieving president returned alone to the cemetery to hold his son's body. George Saunders takes that fragment of history and builds around it a single crowded night in a Georgetown graveyard. Willie wakes into the bardo, an in-between state borrowed from Tibetan Buddhism, populated by restless spirits who refuse to accept that they are dead and pass the time bickering, boasting and confessing. Three of them take a particular interest in the boy, because children who linger there tend to come to grief. The novel unfolds as a chorus of voices, each passage tagged with its speaker like a script, interspersed with snippets from memoirs, letters and histories, some real and some invented. Funny, grotesque and heartbreaking by turns, it becomes a meditation on grief and on how to keep living when loss feels unbearable.
Why read it
For readers ready to try something formally daring, and for anyone who has grieved and wants a book that is honest about it without being bleak.
Fun facts
- 01
It won the 2017 Man Booker Prize and was Saunders's first novel, after decades of acclaimed short stories.
- 02
The audiobook uses 166 narrators recorded in 17 studios, among them Nick Offerman, David Sedaris and Julianne Moore, and it won the Audie Award for Audiobook of the Year.
- 03
Saunders has said the novel grew from a story he heard years earlier about the grieving president visiting his son's crypt, and that he only felt ready to write it around 2012.
- 04
Many of the historical excerpts quoted between the ghosts' voices are genuine 19th-century sources, while others were invented by Saunders.
