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. 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. Within this transitional state - called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo - a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie's soul. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. As all the people in the Bardo can see the cemetery, but aren’t seen by those alive, they are like ghosts. Hans and Roger know that if Willie doesn’t pass to the afterlife, he might get trapped there forever, since that was what happened to a young girl that had appeared there once. From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins a story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. The people in the Bardo believe that they are sick, and not dead. '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. 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. 'My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,' the president says at the time. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. Meanwhile, President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle.

In the bardo