--- product_id: 104473967 title: "Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel" price: "£1.25" currency: GBP in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.co.uk/products/104473967-lincoln-in-the-bardo-a-novel store_origin: GB region: United Kingdom --- # Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel **Price:** £1.25 **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel - **How much does it cost?** £1.25 with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.co.uk](https://www.desertcart.co.uk/products/104473967-lincoln-in-the-bardo-a-novel) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Description WINNER OF THE AUDIE AWARD FOR AUDIOBOOK OF THE YEAR #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE The “devastatingly moving” ( People ) first novel from the author of Tenth of December : a moving and original father-son story featuring none other than Abraham Lincoln, as well as an unforgettable cast of supporting characters, living and dead, historical and invented One of The New York Times ’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century One of The Atlantic ’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years One of Paste ’s Best Novels of the Decade “[ Lincoln in the Bardo ] demonstrates that even the unspeakable—civil war, familial grief—can be named through a close, humanizing narrative voice.”—Amanda Gorman for Time , “25 Books That Capture This American Moment" February 1862. With the Civil War less than one year old, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, 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, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy’s body. From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story that breaks free of its realistic framework into a thrilling, supernatural realm, deploying a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices—living and dead, historical and invented—to ask a timeless question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end? Named One of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post, USA Today, and Maureen Corrigan, NPR One of Time ’s Ten Best Novels of the Year One of O: The Oprah Magazine ’s Best Books of the Year The 166-person full cast features award-winning actors and musicians, as well as a number of Saunders’ family, friends, and members of his publishing team, including, in order of their appearance: Nick Offerman as HANS VOLLMAN David Sedaris as ROGER BEVINS III Carrie Brownstein as ISABELLE PERKINS George Saunders as THE REVEREND EVERLY THOMAS Miranda July as MRS. ELIZABETH CRAWFORD Lena Dunham as ELISE TRAYNOR Ben Stiller as JACK MANDERS Julianne Moore as JANE ELLIS Susan Sarandon as MRS. ABIGAIL BLASS Bradley Whitford as LT. CECIL STONE Bill Hader as EDDIE BARON Megan Mullally as BETSY BARON Rainn Wilson as PERCIVAL “DASH” COLLIER Jeff Tweedy as CAPTAIN WILLIAM PRINCE Kat Dennings as MISS TAMARA DOOLITTLE Jeffrey Tambor as PROFESSOR EDMUND BLOOMER Mike O’Brien as LAWRENCE T. DECROIX Keegan-Michael Key as ELSON FARWELL Don Cheadle as THOMAS HAVENS and Patrick Wilson as STANLEY “PERFESSER” LIPPERT with Kirby Heyborne as WILLIE LINCOLN, Mary Karr as MRS. ROSE MILLAND, and Cassandra Campbell as Your Narrator Review: Death, LIfe, Grief, and Resolve - I have to say upfront that I’ve been a Saunders fan since CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, so I jumped to order this book as soon as I saw it. It’s his first novel, and it’s very Saunders-like — meaning that it’s not like anything he’s done before, because that’s how he does things. It’s written in an unusual voice, which I found a little disorienting and difficult to follow at first. But once you get it, it flows. The story is told by numerous characters and narrators, both contemporaneous characters and historical sources and commentators looking back on the events from the near present. It feels like a play, with characters speaking in turn as much to the audience as to each other. The central event is the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son, Willie. Willie dies at the end of his father’s first year in office, as the Civil War, and the horrors of the war, ramp up. President Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, were devastated by their son’s death, and haunted by guilt that they hadn’t done enough to prevent it as Willie’s sickness worsened. Willie has arrived in a kind of limbo — the bardo — after his death. This limbo is populated by a whole array of characters, many of whom have been there for decades, never able to accept that they have died. For many, some issue, grievance, or unfinished business in general prevents them from letting go of their lives. In Willie’s case, the unwillingness to let go comes from both sides. His father cannot let go of Willie, visiting and staying by his resting place, even taking him from the crypt back into his arms. And Willie is simply taken before he is ready, not letting go of his father, longing to have his father feel his touch. Hans Vollman and Roger Bevins III are seemingly permanent residents of the bardo. They take a special interest in Willie. Normally children as young as Willie don’t stay in the bardo very long, but Willie is a special case. Lincoln provides the view of Willie from life, the child stolen away too early and maybe avoidably. Vollman and Bevins provide the view from the other side, where Willie is not in heaven but lost in this limbo, from which he can’t touch the living world or be touched by the father he left behind. Vollman and Bevins try to help Willie, although the help he really needs, letting go of life, is something they can’t even do for themselves. At the same time, they try to help the president, bringing him together with his son so that each can accept Willie’s death, so that Willie can let go of life and Lincoln can let go of death. All of this happens in parallel with the events of the Civil War, a virtual flood of death itself. Willie’s death and Lincoln’s reaction to it come at the same time that so many are grieving the deaths of so many, under the orders of Lincoln himself. The preident feels the shock of a son’s death while the war’s losses are shocking the mothers and fathers of sons fighting the war, the war that Lincoln feels responsibility for and that he and his critics are seeing go horribly wrong at this stage. The images of Lincoln that Saunders presents, overcome and paralyzed by grief, paint a picture of a depressed president being tested. He must have been tempted to try to end the war and the deaths that are doing to countless parents what Willie’s death is doing to him. Willie and all the dead in the bardo teach Lincoln about the commonality of suffering and the reality of death. When he does let go of Willie, he lets go of grief’s paralysis, for himself and his presidency. He turns a corner away from grief and sorrow and toward resolve. The dead learn a similar resolve. Willie breaks the taboo of the bardo when he says, “Everyone, we are dead!” One measure of a book is its emotional effect. I think this is an oddly inspiring book. “Oddly” because so much of it is about death. But it’s also about an attitude — moving forward and not clinging to things that are over and done with. That goes not only for death but for all the changes we go through within life. Review: Lincoln in the Bardo - amazing, but not without flaws. - George Saunders’ new novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo” is a unique work of historical fiction. It uses a series of accounts, some real, some fictional, all revolving around once singular, true occurrence. While the staccato placement of accounts may have felt sort of jarring on the page it served its particular purpose, in some areas, beautifully. Saunders’ use of contrasting accounts is particularly interesting. Two consecutive accounts on one page describe the moon as incredibly clear, and completely obfuscated. I can’t quite place his intention surrounding those conflicts (but then, unlike George Saunders, I don’t have a genius grand) but it seriously underscores the human capacity for error which was so prominently displayed in the era of the Civil War. George Saunders, ever a fan of the strange, hilarious, and terrifying, managed to create an equivalent of purgatory both calm and incredibly frightening; a “bardo” or inbetween state that its inhabitants are consciously unaware of. To admit one’s own death is embrace it, and to disappear forever. Rather than admit their deaths, the inhabitants of the cemetery in which most of the book’s occurrences unfold emerge from their “sick boxes” each evening, wandering aimlessly within the cemetery grounds, unable to effect any change in the outside world, and waiting endlessly for family that never comes. In the world of the living, meanwhile, Lincoln had spent weeks believing his son was going to recover, when in fact, he only got weaker. While his son suffered through his final hours, Lincoln held a feast. Some of the accounts featured in the book judge Lincoln quite harshly for this, but can it really be blamed? He was, after all, the president, and was expected to hold dinners at the white house, although the merriment may well have been in excess. His son had been ill for weeks, how was he to know this was poor Willie’s final day? All of these accounts of his faults, and the imagined thoughts in his head serve one, perfectly executed purpose - to paint Abraham Lincoln as human. He was imperfect. In his early days his handling of the Civil War was clumsy and purposeless. He held a loud, raucous party while his boy suffered. But he loved his son. No account Saunders created could demonstrate that more than the truth of history - the first night Willie Lincoln was interred, Abraham Lincoln was absent from the Whitehouse. The president was seen by the gatekeeper of the cemetery, entering late in the evening, and not leaving until morning. This emotional momentum is echoed by the voices of the chorus of ghosts present in the cemetery, who come to terms with their own death largely by witnessing the purity of sorrow felt by Lincoln, but they do get tedious. The purposeful repetition was overused quite often throughout the novel, and I think a more judicious editor would have done the book some good. Additionally, I think that the utter lack of standard prose detracts from George Saunders's greatest asset - his voice. His capacity to display people at their barest, simplest, most childlike emotional state was largely absent from the novel, replaced by an editorial echo of the loss felt by the nation during the civil war. Either way, Saunders presents an incredibly introspective story - one where missed opportunity, loss, and a deep sense of mourning overpower any of the books faults. Personal notes - I would rank George Saunders amongst the greatest fiction writers who have ever lived, and as perhaps the greatest ever American fiction writer (high praise considering there is a Kurt Vonnegut quote eternally present on my chest.) His transition from the short story to the novel underscores a new potential for him to exercise his voice. One I hope he will make ample use of. ## Images ![Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/911l787eFjL.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Death, LIfe, Grief, and Resolve *by D***S on March 4, 2017* I have to say upfront that I’ve been a Saunders fan since CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, so I jumped to order this book as soon as I saw it. It’s his first novel, and it’s very Saunders-like — meaning that it’s not like anything he’s done before, because that’s how he does things. It’s written in an unusual voice, which I found a little disorienting and difficult to follow at first. But once you get it, it flows. The story is told by numerous characters and narrators, both contemporaneous characters and historical sources and commentators looking back on the events from the near present. It feels like a play, with characters speaking in turn as much to the audience as to each other. The central event is the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son, Willie. Willie dies at the end of his father’s first year in office, as the Civil War, and the horrors of the war, ramp up. President Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, were devastated by their son’s death, and haunted by guilt that they hadn’t done enough to prevent it as Willie’s sickness worsened. Willie has arrived in a kind of limbo — the bardo — after his death. This limbo is populated by a whole array of characters, many of whom have been there for decades, never able to accept that they have died. For many, some issue, grievance, or unfinished business in general prevents them from letting go of their lives. In Willie’s case, the unwillingness to let go comes from both sides. His father cannot let go of Willie, visiting and staying by his resting place, even taking him from the crypt back into his arms. And Willie is simply taken before he is ready, not letting go of his father, longing to have his father feel his touch. Hans Vollman and Roger Bevins III are seemingly permanent residents of the bardo. They take a special interest in Willie. Normally children as young as Willie don’t stay in the bardo very long, but Willie is a special case. Lincoln provides the view of Willie from life, the child stolen away too early and maybe avoidably. Vollman and Bevins provide the view from the other side, where Willie is not in heaven but lost in this limbo, from which he can’t touch the living world or be touched by the father he left behind. Vollman and Bevins try to help Willie, although the help he really needs, letting go of life, is something they can’t even do for themselves. At the same time, they try to help the president, bringing him together with his son so that each can accept Willie’s death, so that Willie can let go of life and Lincoln can let go of death. All of this happens in parallel with the events of the Civil War, a virtual flood of death itself. Willie’s death and Lincoln’s reaction to it come at the same time that so many are grieving the deaths of so many, under the orders of Lincoln himself. The preident feels the shock of a son’s death while the war’s losses are shocking the mothers and fathers of sons fighting the war, the war that Lincoln feels responsibility for and that he and his critics are seeing go horribly wrong at this stage. The images of Lincoln that Saunders presents, overcome and paralyzed by grief, paint a picture of a depressed president being tested. He must have been tempted to try to end the war and the deaths that are doing to countless parents what Willie’s death is doing to him. Willie and all the dead in the bardo teach Lincoln about the commonality of suffering and the reality of death. When he does let go of Willie, he lets go of grief’s paralysis, for himself and his presidency. He turns a corner away from grief and sorrow and toward resolve. The dead learn a similar resolve. Willie breaks the taboo of the bardo when he says, “Everyone, we are dead!” One measure of a book is its emotional effect. I think this is an oddly inspiring book. “Oddly” because so much of it is about death. But it’s also about an attitude — moving forward and not clinging to things that are over and done with. That goes not only for death but for all the changes we go through within life. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Lincoln in the Bardo - amazing, but not without flaws. *by A***. on March 23, 2017* George Saunders’ new novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo” is a unique work of historical fiction. It uses a series of accounts, some real, some fictional, all revolving around once singular, true occurrence. While the staccato placement of accounts may have felt sort of jarring on the page it served its particular purpose, in some areas, beautifully. Saunders’ use of contrasting accounts is particularly interesting. Two consecutive accounts on one page describe the moon as incredibly clear, and completely obfuscated. I can’t quite place his intention surrounding those conflicts (but then, unlike George Saunders, I don’t have a genius grand) but it seriously underscores the human capacity for error which was so prominently displayed in the era of the Civil War. George Saunders, ever a fan of the strange, hilarious, and terrifying, managed to create an equivalent of purgatory both calm and incredibly frightening; a “bardo” or inbetween state that its inhabitants are consciously unaware of. To admit one’s own death is embrace it, and to disappear forever. Rather than admit their deaths, the inhabitants of the cemetery in which most of the book’s occurrences unfold emerge from their “sick boxes” each evening, wandering aimlessly within the cemetery grounds, unable to effect any change in the outside world, and waiting endlessly for family that never comes. In the world of the living, meanwhile, Lincoln had spent weeks believing his son was going to recover, when in fact, he only got weaker. While his son suffered through his final hours, Lincoln held a feast. Some of the accounts featured in the book judge Lincoln quite harshly for this, but can it really be blamed? He was, after all, the president, and was expected to hold dinners at the white house, although the merriment may well have been in excess. His son had been ill for weeks, how was he to know this was poor Willie’s final day? All of these accounts of his faults, and the imagined thoughts in his head serve one, perfectly executed purpose - to paint Abraham Lincoln as human. He was imperfect. In his early days his handling of the Civil War was clumsy and purposeless. He held a loud, raucous party while his boy suffered. But he loved his son. No account Saunders created could demonstrate that more than the truth of history - the first night Willie Lincoln was interred, Abraham Lincoln was absent from the Whitehouse. The president was seen by the gatekeeper of the cemetery, entering late in the evening, and not leaving until morning. This emotional momentum is echoed by the voices of the chorus of ghosts present in the cemetery, who come to terms with their own death largely by witnessing the purity of sorrow felt by Lincoln, but they do get tedious. The purposeful repetition was overused quite often throughout the novel, and I think a more judicious editor would have done the book some good. Additionally, I think that the utter lack of standard prose detracts from George Saunders's greatest asset - his voice. His capacity to display people at their barest, simplest, most childlike emotional state was largely absent from the novel, replaced by an editorial echo of the loss felt by the nation during the civil war. Either way, Saunders presents an incredibly introspective story - one where missed opportunity, loss, and a deep sense of mourning overpower any of the books faults. Personal notes - I would rank George Saunders amongst the greatest fiction writers who have ever lived, and as perhaps the greatest ever American fiction writer (high praise considering there is a Kurt Vonnegut quote eternally present on my chest.) His transition from the short story to the novel underscores a new potential for him to exercise his voice. One I hope he will make ample use of. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Lincoln Through a Gothic Lens *by R***Y on December 25, 2020* (In Tibetan Buddhism, the Bardo is a state of existence between death and rebirth varying in length according to a person's conduct in life and manner of, or age at, death.) William Wallace "Willie" Lincoln was eleven-years-old when he passed away in the White House after suffering a protracted bout of typhoid fever. His younger brother, Tad, also had the fever but survived. Willie's funeral was at the White House and he was then temporarily interred in the Carroll family vault at Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown. The Lincoln family anticipated eventually interring Willie at a cemetery in Springfield, Illinois. When Abe Lincoln was murdered three years later, Willie's casket accompanied that of his father on the train to their final resting place in Illinois. Willie Lincoln reportedly had an exuberant personality and appeared to be the favored child of both parents. His death seems to have hastened Mary Lincoln's slide into mental distress, and it had a pronounced emotional impact on his father. In his novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders presents a fictionalized account of how Willie Lincoln's death might possibly have influenced the course of social advancement in the United States. The "bardo" envisioned by George Saunders was the Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown where Willie was laid to rest. By day it was just an ordinary cemetery whose oldest burial dated back to the Revolutionary War, but by night it was a spirit-infested gathering place for many of the tormented souls whose bodies were interred there. The spirits would rise from their graves at dusk and spend the nighttime visiting among themselves and re-living their past lives, often giving the same speeches night after night. When daylight approached they went back underground and rested in their "sick boxes" with eyes closed so that they did not see the putrid remains that stayed within the boxes The residents of the cemetery or bardo did not realize they were dead. Many knew that they had been brought to this place while convalescing in their "sick boxes" by multitudes of relatives and friends. The boxes had been buried, with the patients inside, and the arrivals waited patiently for their loved ones to return or for their circumstances to change. There was something beyond, and occasionally people would explode in a burst of light and noise and move to the next destination, but most were afraid of that transition and struggled to remain where they were. Infants and young children usually left immediately, but older individuals would either grow tired and disillusioned and give up, or they would be talked into leaving by visiting apparitions - or they reluctantly stayed put. Things began to change when young Willie Lincoln arrived at the cemetery. Willie's spirit was sitting atop the Carroll family vault the night after his funeral, and the adult spirits were assuming that he would soon be taking flight to the next place, but then something odd happened. Willie's father showed up at the cemetery riding a horse so short that the rider's feet almost touched the ground. The father entered the vault, pulled his son's casket out from where it was shelved, opened it and began to mourn his lost son. The visit was highly unusual and it caught the attention of all of the spirits. When the President left later that night he said aloud that he would return. Many of the residents thought that might bring about some changes in their circumstances. As the tale plays out, Willie and his father have an impact on one another as well as on the spirits of the bardo, and some of those spirits manage to impart their thoughts into the mind of Abraham Lincoln. The author, George Saunders, has penned a very unique book that draws upon multiple styles of writing. One reviewer went so far as to state that the author may have engineered a whole new writing genre with this effort. Saunder's "bardo," while closely following the Tibetan model, is also somewhat reminiscent of the Grover's Corners Cemetery residents of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," although those envisioned by Saunders sometimes have grotesque appearances that do not resemble their earthly bodies. The historical depictions, such as one set describing a White House holiday party, are pieced-together snippets from various diaries, historical journals, books, etc, in much the same manner as those made famous by Ken Burns. The fictional residents of the bardo also speak in snippets that gradually reveal their past lives and concerns. The writing can seem fragmented, but sticking with the award-winning choppy tale results is a most satisfying reading experience. I recommend Lincoln in the Bardo without reservation! --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.co.uk/products/104473967-lincoln-in-the-bardo-a-novel](https://www.desertcart.co.uk/products/104473967-lincoln-in-the-bardo-a-novel) --- *Product available on Desertcart United Kingdom* *Store origin: GB* *Last updated: 2026-06-08*