George Saunders's brilliant debut novel about a grieving Lincoln confirms him as a literary star . To read Saunders's fiction is to be dazzled by ingenuity, imagination and searing comic verve ... A tender but trenchant reminder that America is and always has been many-voiced: not one story, but millions (Sunday Times)A luminous feat of generosity and humanism. Such is Saunders's magnificent portraiture that readers will recognize in this wretchedness and bravery aspects of their own characters as well (Colson Whitehead New York Times)Lincoln in the Bardo is part-historical novel, part-carnivalesque phantasmagoria. It may well be the most strange and brilliant book you'll read this year . This is a novel that's so intimate and human, so profound, that it seems like an act of grace (Financial Times)Dazzling and disorientating . As you turn the pages of this remarkable novel it starts to feel uncannily like a hinge in American history (The Times)It would be an understatement to call this novel an extraordinary tour de force ... It shows an author making a spectacular imaginative leap . With uncanny mastery, Saunders encompasses aching emotion and macabre fantasy ... Prodigiously inventive, this is a novel that takes enormous risks ... Phenomenal narrative panache ... A master-feat of vitality (Sunday Times)Saunders conjures a breathtakingly agile narrative . His first novel is a brilliant, exhausting, emotionally involving attempt to get up again, to fight for empathy, kindness and self-sacrifice, and to resist (Observer)A father-son narrative that is both hilarious and haunting (Evening Standard)Saunders's extraordinary verbal energy is harnessed, for the most part, in the service of capturing the pathos of everyday life . It is Saunders's beautifully realized portrait of Lincoln - caught at this hinge moment in time, in his own personal bardo, as it were - that powers this book (Michiko Kakutani New York Times)A masterpiece (Zadie Smith New York Times)An incredible work of art. Deeply moral, heartfelt, hilarious, and wildly imaginative (Buzzfeed)A strange and haunting novel - his highly anticipated first, after decades of short-story wizardry - about the effect the dead have on the living, and the living on the dead (Economist)As the story canters along, the voices are variously gossipy, profane, profound or comic, a busy Greek chorus that ranges over death, slavery, sex, war, love, endless rue and the awful grief a child's death arouses. The writing constantly surprises (Mail on Sunday)Lincoln in the Bardo has great matters on its mind: freedom and slavery, the spirit and the body. But it is, finally, "about" Abraham Lincoln, that great spectral presence in a whole subgenre of American fiction (New Yorker)Must be one of my favourite novels. What a warm, kindhearted and radical piece of writing. Such delicacy, such serious wit. I love it (Max Porter)This is a book that confounds our expectations of what a novel should look and sound like (Washington Post)The much anticipated long-form debut from the US short-story maestro does not dissapoint (Guardian 2017-01-07)An original father-son tale that expertly blends history and fiction (and even the supernatural), Lincoln in the Bardo explores grief, loss, life, death (Buzzfeed Year Ahead in Books)A historical novel like no other - a supernatural ensemble extravaganza of awesome intricacy (Daily Telegraph)George Saunders makes you feel as though you are reading fiction for the first time (Khaled Hosseini)A cacophonous, genre-busting book inspired by the death of Abraham Lincoln's young son (Metro 2017-01-09)A morally passionate, serious writer ... He will be read long after these times have passed (Zadie Smith)He makes the all-but-impossible look effortless. We're lucky to have him (Jonathan Franzen)An astoundingly tuned voice - graceful, dark, authentic and funny (Thomas Pynchon)Saunders is a writer of arresting brilliance and originality, with a sure sense of his material and apparently inexhaustible resources of voice ... Scary, hilarious and unforgettable (Tobias Wolff)There is no one better, no one more essential (Dave Eggers)Few people cut as hard or deep as Saunders does (Junot Diaz)Saunders is a true original - restlessly inventive, yet deeply humane (Jennifer Egan)Reading George Saunders is, it's safe to say, like no other literary experience (Observer)No one writes more powerfully than George Saunders about the lost, the unlucky, the disenfranchised (Michiko Kakutani New York Times)Funny, poignant - in flashes, deeply moving - light as a feather and consistently weird (Hari Kunzru)There is really no one like him. He is an original - but everyone knows that (Lorrie Moore)Swings from hilarious to crushing and back again with astonishing dexterity . An exceptional novel . Believe the hype (Chicago Review of Books)Strange, profound, melancholy . In the final of Lincoln of the Bardo, the realities of death and loss are faced head-on ... Historical fiction will never be the same (Newsday)The author may have set out to write his first novel, but the work he completed is a genre unto itself (The Atlantic)An unsentimental novel of Shakespearean proportions, gorgeously stuffed with tragic characters, bawdy humor, terrifying visions, throat-catching tenderness, and a galloping narrative (Elle)One of the strangest books of mainstream fiction around, competing only with some of Saunders's own story collection for unbridled inventiveness (GQ)A matterlightblooming phenomenon. Loud and big. Exploding with grief and, more so, hope. And better left undescribed until you yourself reach the end (Time)It's only February but this will undoubtedly be considered one of the best books of 2017 (Huffington Post)Wonderfully bizarre and hilariously terrifying examination of the ability to live and love (Poets & Writers)

A NO. 1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 'It would be an understatement to call this novel an extraordinary tour de force' Sunday Times

The extraordinary first novel by the bestselling, Folio Prize-winning, National Book Award-shortlisted George Saunders, about Abraham Lincoln and the death of his eleven year old son, Willie, at the dawn of the Civil War

The American Civil War rages while President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son lies gravely ill. In a matter of days, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns to the crypt several times alone to hold his boy's body.

From this seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of realism, entering a thrilling, supernatural domain both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself trapped in a transitional realm - called, in Tibetan tradition, the bardo - and as ghosts mingle, squabble, gripe and commiserate, and stony tendrils creep towards the boy, a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie's soul.

Unfolding over a single night, Lincoln in the Bardo is written with George Saunders' inimitable humour, pathos and grace. Here he invents an exhilarating new form, and is confirmed as one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Deploying a theatrical, kaleidoscopic panoply of voices - living and dead, historical and fictional - Lincoln in the Bardo poses a timeless question: how do we live and love when we know that everything we hold dear must end?