Lincoln in the Bardo
Lincoln in the Bardo
A grieving president in a graveyard full of ghosts who do not know they are dead. The strangest, most tender book you will read this year.
Willie's Tomb
George Saunders's 2017 Booker Prize-winning debut novel takes place over a single night in a Washington DC cemetery in 1862, where the ghosts of the recently deceased gather in the bardo, a Tibetan Buddhist concept for the liminal state between death and rebirth. Among them are the ghosts of eccentric, tragic, and comic dead who cannot let go of life. When President Abraham Lincoln enters the cemetery to visit the tomb of his eleven-year-old son Willie, who has just died of typhoid fever, the restless dead are stirred to a collective reckoning. Assembled from fictional and real historical accounts in a polyphonic collage of voices.
Reading Lincoln in the Bardo
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"We are all dying. We are all in the bardo together.
"George Saunders · Lincoln in the Bardo
Saunders was inspired by a story, likely apocryphal, that Lincoln visited his son's tomb and briefly opened the casket to hold the body a final time. He spent sixteen years figuring out what kind of book that story wanted to be.
The novel won the Man Booker Prize in 2017. The audiobook is performed by 166 voice actors including Nick Offerman, David Sedaris, Susan Sarandon, and Saunders himself in a landmark production.