Title: Lincoln in the Bardo
Description: 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 a story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its 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.
Subjects: FICTION / Ghost, Presidents, Biographical fiction, Fiction, Grief, Historical fiction, FICTION / Literary, FICTION / Historical, Fiction, biographical, Fiction, historical, Presidents, united states, fiction, Purgatory, Large type books, LGBTQ historical fiction, nyt:combined-print-and-e-book-fiction=2017-03-05, New York Times bestseller, New York Times reviewed, Fiction, historical, general, 18.06 Anglo-American literature, Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865 - Fiction, Presidents - United States - Fiction, Grief - Fiction, Historical, Ghost, General, Bereavement, American Civil War, Slavery
Places: United States, Georgetown (Washington, D.C.)
People: Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), William Wallace Lincoln (1850-1862)