Will I love Lincoln in the Bardo?

We often feel alone when we experience change and transitions, but Saunders’s book reminds me that we’re all on the journey of life together.

President Lincoln can’t let go of his young son, Willie, when the boy dies of typhoid fever. Willie, too, is holding on: lingering in the after-death world, he’s convinced his parents are going to come get him. He’s surrounded by people who are also in bardo (the state between death and rebirth), trapped in denial and attachment. When they accept the reality of their situation, the characters are liberated from their suffering.

This book has deepened… show more.

This was one of the strangest, most beautiful books I’ve ever read. At first, the format can throw you off. A chorus of dead voices, snippets of historical and imagined texts? But once I got into the rhythm, it felt like something sacred. The cemetery setting becomes a limbo space where spirits cling to their stories, fears, and unfinished business.

I found myself unexpectedly emotional, especially in how it portrayed grief—Lincoln’s grief, yes, but also the collective grief of the dead. It made me think about what we leave behind and how love can echo even after death. It was… show more.

I’ve never read a book with funnier ghosts haunting the pages. Saunders is a genius at blending bleakness with wonder and the hope of ever-elusive joy on every page.

I loved the conversations between the ghosts as they watched Abraham Lincoln's quest to hold his dead son one last time. The book’s structure is unlike anything I’ve ever encountered, somewhere between a play and fiction and something uniquely its own.

At times, it is absurd, but it never misses the mark on emotional resonance. I read it seven years ago and still think about it all the time…Saunder’s work truly… show more.

Speaking of authors who combine stylistic daring with profound emotion, I give you George Saunders. Saunders’s strange and funny stories prompted me to try my hand at writing fiction, and his first novel is one of my favorite books.

Inspired by the true story of Abraham Lincoln sneaking, on multiple occasions, into a Washington D.C. crypt to cradle the corpse of his young son, Willie, this book also breathes life into a sizeable cast of ghosts squatting in the “Bardo”—a liminal space between life and death. As the American Civil War rages, President Lincoln and the unwilling ghosts must all… show more.

I honestly think this is one of the greatest books I’ve ever read.

In writing about haunting, I always confront the question of what pins ghosts to the living world. I loved the poignancy of Saunders’s ghosts and the desperate denial of their own deaths that they cling to.

I have a special love of books written in a multiplicity of voices; the way Saunders writes his ghostly chorus is so virtuosic it took my breath away. 

I loved this novel because it was haunting, historical, and existential with an experimental format that blew my mind almost like an intense meditation session.

While some people may find the experimental format jarring, it transported me to a surreal disorienting dimension similar to a dream or bardo state. If you’re not familiar with the Bardo, it’s worth researching.

The word Bardo in the title is what originally attracted me to the novel because of my interest in Buddhism. Yet the bardo in this novel reminded me more of Dante’s Inferno!

The technique used at the beginning to establish the… show more.

If you’ve ever looked at a picture of Abraham Lincoln and wondered why he looked so sad, you may find your answer here. He faced an almost insurmountable challenge and mourned the potentially fatal division of his country, it is true. But the death of his young son compounded that grief. Before reading this book, I had never heard of a ‘Bardo,’ and I’m still not convinced of its existence, except as a psychological state. But as a bereaved parent myself, I could understand Lincoln’s need to hold onto the memory of his dead son a little while longer. If… show more.

Lincoln in the Bardo is a compelling, harrowing novel about our greatest American political leader, and probably one of our greatest poets as well. Abraham Lincoln, in raw grief at the death of his beloved son Willie, soars in his humanity and intelligence, and resolve above the strange but beautiful world of this novel—a kind of transitional place between life and death. No book about politics has captured so well the tangled web of the personal and the political in a complex world.

The power of the spectral afterworld in this novel convinced me to cast my novel about John… show more.

Persevere with this book. I had trouble with its unorthodox structure and convoluted opening, and almost gave up. But this complex novel is worth the struggle, and yielded deeper emotional impact upon a second reading. The inhabitants of Oak Hill Cemetery are confused and distorted spirits trapped in bardo, a Buddhist term for the shadow state between life and death. Unable to acknowledge their actual condition, they retreat to their “sick-boxes” (coffins) during the day and congregate at night. They are joined by the traumatized spirit of a young boy named Willie. When Willie’s father, President Abraham Lincoln, visits in… show more.