Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel

· Sold by Random House
4.5
58 reviews
Ebook
368
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE

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 Pastes Best Novels of the Decade

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 • A New York Times Notable Book One of O: The Oprah Magazine’s Best Books of the Year


February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.” 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 of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state—called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo—a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul.

Lincoln in the Bardo
is an astonishing feat of imagination and a bold step forward from one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Formally daring, generous in spirit, deeply concerned with matters of the heart, it is a testament to fiction’s ability to speak honestly and powerfully to the things that really matter to us. Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end?

“A luminous feat of generosity and humanism.”—Colson Whitehead, The New York Times Book Review


“A masterpiece.”Zadie Smith

Ratings and reviews

4.5
58 reviews
Toby A. Smith
May 28, 2021
This award-winning, New York Times bestseller is NOT for everyone. It was George Saunders' first full-length novel, published in 2017 and its style is definitely experimental. LINCOLN IN THE BARDO takes place in 1862, the middle of the American Civil War, around the death of 11-year-old William "Willie" Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's son. And, for me, the beautifully written passages featuring these two characters were my favorites--Willie trying to understand the very adult concept that he has lost his life and our former President weighed down by incomprehensible grief in the middle of a national crisis. But as the title implies, most of the "action" takes place in the bardo, with many other characters. The bardo -- a Buddhist term referring to the transitional space between death and rebirth -- is populated by many deceased people from different time periods, all having conversations, arguing, and exchanging anecdotes about their lives. These sections of the book read much like a play -- where one character in the Bardo says one thing (followed by the name of who is speaking) and then a second adds detail or opinion and so on. Together, their dialog often tells one story. Juxtaposed to these "Bardo" pieced-together stories, are quotes lifted from actual historic documents, describing events from writers of this era. What's interesting is how much the actual quotes mirror those from the Bardo, in that historical record-keepers are seldom in agreement about what happened, just as people seldom agree on what actually happened during an event they all witnessed. This is one of those books that you will either love or dislike ("hate" seems too strong). I am mostly in the latter category. I appreciated the book's novelty. I found a compelling portrait of parental grief. And it was interesting to contemplate what might exist immediately after death. But I found the style kept me at a distance and the conversations among those in the bardo were much less interesting than the story of Willie and his father. And YES, I do recommend everyone give this one a try.
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Anna Kravchuk
March 31, 2018
It is a rare book which is impossible to retell, you need to read it, word by word. The plot is simple but the style...if you found yourself on the cemetery with 200 ghosts standing around of you, speaking the same story all in the same time, that's what it would look like. Reading this book you feel surrounded by the shadows of the past and in your head, it creates both chaos and a very full picture of what was happening. Small details overlap with large events. Breathtaking.
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Dmitry Mikhaylov
October 29, 2017
This book is really hard to read because of the way it's written: as a narrative of talking ghosts and quotations from historical sources. If I had wanted to read about historical facts, I wouldn't have chosen a fiction book. There are a couple of things that I like about this book: the ideas about how ghost feel themselves in the Bardo, and the way their lives are judged by God.
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About the author

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.

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