Lincoln in the Bardo

novel by Saunders

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July 22, 2026

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Lincoln in the Bardo is the debut novel by American author George Saunders, published in 2017. It won the Booker Prize for fiction. The novel is set during the American Civil War and focuses on the grief of Abraham Lincoln over the death of his son, Willie. The narrative imagines Lincoln visiting the crypt where his son is buried and interacting with a chorus of spirits. The title refers to the Tibetan Buddhist concept of the bardo, an intermediate state between death and rebirth.12

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George Saunders
Saunders’s first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, takes the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son William Wallace (“Willie”) and Lincoln’s grief as its subject. Complex in form and ambitious in scope, it imagines the grieving president interacting with a chorus of spirits during his frequent visits to the Georgetown…
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Saunders’s first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, takes the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son William Wallace (“Willie”) and Lincoln’s grief as its subject. Complex in form and ambitious in scope, it imagines the grieving president interacting with a chorus of spirits during his frequent visits to the Georgetown…
Read More