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

People: Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865),  William Wallace Lincoln (1850-1862)

Places: United States