In his long-awaited first novel, American master George Saunders delivers his most original, transcendent, and moving work yet. Unfolding in a graveyard over the course of a single night, narrated by a dazzling chorus of voices, Lincoln in the Bardo is a literary experience unlike any other—for no one but Saunders could conceive it.
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 returned to the crypt several times alone 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 thrilling, 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—living and dead, historical and invented—to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end?
Trigger Warning is a mesmerizing collection of short stories and poems by the acclaimed author Neil Gaiman. This anthology explores the transformative power of imagination and the hidden depths of reality.
In Adventure Story—a thematic companion to the novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane—Gaiman delves into themes of death and the stories we carry with us. A Calendar of Tales offers a collection of short pieces inspired by the months of the year, featuring tales of pirates, March winds, and an igloo made of books.
Gaiman's The Case of Death and Honey presents an ingenious twist on Sherlock Holmes, while Nothing O'Clock is a special Doctor Who story written for the beloved series. The never-before-published Black Dog revisits the world of American Gods, following Shadow Moon on a haunting journey.
Gaiman's literary alchemy transports readers to a world where the fantastical becomes real and the everyday is incandescent. A treasury of wonders, Trigger Warning engages the mind, stirs the heart, and shakes the soul.