George Saunders

George Saunders is an American fiction writer and MacArthur Fellow whose novel Lincoln in the Bardo won the Man Booker Prize and showcased his singular blend of compassion and formal invention.

George Saunders spent two decades writing short fiction — celebrated collections like CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Tenth of December — before publishing his first novel, and the delay shows in the best possible way. Lincoln in the Bardo, published in 2017, is formally extraordinary: the story of Abraham Lincoln’s grief over the death of his son Willie, told partly through a chorus of ghosts inhabiting the Georgetown graveyard where the boy’s body lies, and partly through an invented compilation of historical sources — newspaper accounts, diaries, memoirs — about the night of Willie’s funeral. The novel won the Man Booker Prize and divided readers precisely because of its ambition.

Saunders has a rare gift for writing with both intelligence and warmth simultaneously, and Lincoln in the Bardo is his most fully realised expression of it. The ghosts — each defined by the unfinished business that keeps them trapped — are rendered with a specificity that makes the novel’s philosophical inquiry into death, loss, and continuity feel genuinely personal rather than conceptual. Lincoln himself is portrayed with great compassion, the private grief of a man managing impossible public weight.

The novel’s structure is its most challenging element: the chorus of ghost voices and the fragmented historical sources require readers to actively construct the narrative from multiple registers. Some readers find this exhilarating; others find it unnecessarily difficult. But Saunders’ humanism — his fundamental belief in the dignity and reality of every consciousness — gives the formal invention a grounding warmth that makes the book ultimately generous rather than cold.