Lincoln in the bardo : a novel / George Saunders.
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.
Item details
- ISBN: 9780812995343
- ISBN: 0812995341
- Physical Description: 341 pages ; 25 cm
- Edition: First edition.
- Publisher: New York : Random House, [2017]
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Genre: | Biographical fiction. Historical fiction. Biographical fiction. Historical fiction. Paranormal fiction. Fiction. Biographical fiction. Historical fiction. |
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Newton County Library System: Covington Branch Library |
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