Lincoln in the Bardo

Lincoln in the Bardo is a 2017 novel by the American writer George Saunders and his first full-length work of fiction. It takes as its starting point a story Saunders heard about Lincoln visiting his son's crypt at Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown more than once to hold the boy's body, an account supported by newspaper reports of the time.

Willie Lincoln dies early in 1862, less than a year into the Civil War, and most of the novel takes place over a single night in the cemetery, where the dead occupy a choral, arguing, overlapping interval between life and what comes next. Saunders builds the book out of many voices and out of quoted historical material, so the narrative arrives in fragments rather than in conventional chapters.

Lincoln's grief and the war's early battles give the novel its weight, and the ghosts around Willie supply the comedy and the resistance to letting him go. The book was written after Saunders had spent years on short stories, and its form is deliberate: the reader assembles the scene from testimony in the way a historian would.