02262cam a2200385 i 4500 437874991 TxAuBib 20200923120000.0 160229s2017||||||||||||||||||||||||eng|u 2016004993 9780812995343 0812995341 TxAuBib rda Saunders, George. Lincoln in the bardo : a novel / George Saunders. First edition. New York : Random House, [2017] ℗2017. 341 pages ; 25 cm. txt rdacontent n rdamedia nc rdacarrier 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 an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, 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. 20200923. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865 Fiction. Lincoln, William Wallace, 1850-1862 Fiction. Presidents United States Fiction. Grief Fiction. Purgatory Fiction. Spirits Fiction. Ghosts Fiction. Supernatural Fiction. Biographical fiction. Historical fiction.