WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017
George Saunders is the author of nine books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize. Tenth of December was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the inaugural Folio Prize. He has received MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships and the PEN/Malamud Prize for excellence in the short story, and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time magazine. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University. georgesaundersbooks.com
George Saunders’s brilliant debut novel about a grieving Lincoln
confirms him as a literary star … To read Saunders’s fiction is to
be dazzled by ingenuity, imagination and searing comic verve ... A
tender but trenchant reminder that America is and always has been
many-voiced: not one story, but millions
*Sunday Times*
Death haunts us, and in Lincoln in the Bardo George Saunders mines
the many ways it does: the Gothic, the sentimental, the fearful
and, above all, the grief-stricken
*New Statesman, Books of the Year 2017*
I was impressed but challenged by the originality and scope of
George Saunders’s Booker-winning story of grief and empathy,
Lincoln in the Bardo
*Guardian, Best Books of 2017*
A luminous feat of generosity and humanism… Such is Saunders’s
magnificent portraiture that readers will recognize in this
wretchedness and bravery aspects of their own characters as
well
*New York Times*
The most strange and brilliant book you’ll read this year …
Riotously imagined ... So intimate and human, so profound, that it
seems like an act of grace
*Financial Times*
A historical novel that hews deeply and movingly to archival fact
while also being an all-out crazy spectacle of his own invention
... A puzzling, hilarious vortex of invention that only Saunders
could pull off. The novel made me feel intimate with Lincoln, and
that particular moment of history, in a way I never had before
*Guardian, Best Books of 2017*
Ingenious ... As entrancing as it is beautiful
*Observer, Best Books of the Year 2017*
Dazzling and disorientating … As you turn the pages of this
remarkable novel it starts to feel uncannily like a hinge in
American history
*The Times*
Lincoln in the Bardo was every bit as wonderful as I expected from
the great George Saunders
*Observer, Best Books of the Year 2017*
It would be an understatement to call this novel an extraordinary
tour de force ... Steeped in morality, it's a master-feat of
vitality
*Sunday Times*
Could hardly be more of a phenomenal tour de force ... Encompassing
macabre fantasy and aching emotion, this brilliantly imaginative
excursion into a post-mortem world hauntingly celebrates the
pleasures and the privilege of life
*The Sunday Times, 'Novel of the Year 2017'*
A breathtakingly agile narrative … A brilliant, exhausting,
emotionally involving attempt to get up again, to fight for
empathy, kindness and self-sacrifice, and to resist
*Observer*
The book is as weird as it sounds, but it’s also pretty darn
good
*The Times, Best Fiction of 2017*
A surreal metaphysical drama about grief and freedom ... A
father-son narrative that is both hilarious and haunting
*Evening Standard*
I was so pleased that George Saunders won the Booker for Lincoln in
the Bardo. He’s like literary psilocybin, scaring the bejesus out
of you before revealing the world anew
*Evening Standard, Books of the Year 2017*
Saunders’s extraordinary verbal energy is harnessed, for the most
part, in the service of capturing the pathos of everyday life … It
is Saunders’s beautifully realized portrait of Lincoln — caught at
this hinge moment in time, in his own personal bardo, as it were —
that powers this book
*New York Times*
I can’t choose Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders: everyone
will, right? Still, it’s utterly astonishing
*New Statesman, Books of the Year 2017*
A masterpiece
*New York Times*
‘The Man Booker Prize judges got it right in choosing George
Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo ... A polyphonic masterpiece, by
turns hilarious and deeply poignant
*New Statesman, Books of the Year 2017*
An incredible work of art. Deeply moral, heartfelt, hilarious, and
wildly imaginative
*Buzzfeed*
A strange and haunting novel – his highly anticipated first, after
decades of short-story wizardry – about the effect the dead have on
the living, and the living on the dead
*Economist*
The story canters along ... The writing constantly surprises
*Mail on Sunday*
Lincoln in the Bardo has great matters on its mind: freedom and
slavery, the spirit and the body. But it is, finally, “about”
Abraham Lincoln, that great spectral presence in a whole subgenre
of American fiction
*New Yorker*
Must be one of my favourite novels. What a warm, kindhearted and
radical piece of writing. Such delicacy, such serious wit. I love
it
*Max Porter*
This is a book that confounds our expectations of what a novel
should look and sound like
*Washington Post*
The much anticipated long-form debut from the US short-story
maestro does not dissapoint
*Guardian*
An original father-son tale that expertly blends history and
fiction (and even the supernatural), Lincoln in the Bardo explores
grief, loss, life, death
*Buzzfeed Year Ahead in Books*
A historical novel like no other – a supernatural ensemble
extravaganza of awesome intricacy and somewhat perplexing purpose
... A feat of style ... A polyphonic spree that spins the head
*Daily Telegraph*
George Saunders makes you feel as though you are reading fiction
for the first time
*Khaled Hosseini*
A cacophonous, genre-busting book inspired by the death of Abraham
Lincoln's young son
*Metro*
A morally passionate, serious writer ... He will be read long after
these times have passed
*Zadie Smith*
He makes the all-but-impossible look effortless. We're lucky to
have him
*Jonathan Franzen*
An astoundingly tuned voice – graceful, dark, authentic and
funny
*Thomas Pynchon*
Saunders is a writer of arresting brilliance and originality, with
a sure sense of his material and apparently inexhaustible resources
of voice ... Scary, hilarious and unforgettable
*Tobias Wolff*
There is no one better, no one more essential
*Dave Eggers*
Few people cut as hard or deep as Saunders does
*Junot Diaz*
Saunders is a true original - restlessly inventive, yet deeply
humane
*Jennifer Egan*
Reading George Saunders is, it's safe to say, like no other
literary experience
*Observer*
No one writes more powerfully than George Saunders about the lost,
the unlucky, the disenfranchised
*New York Times*
Funny, poignant – in flashes, deeply moving – light as a feather
and consistently weird
*Hari Kunzru*
There is really no one like him. He is an original – but everyone
knows that
*Lorrie Moore*
Swings from hilarious to crushing and back again with astonishing
dexterity … An exceptional novel … Believe the hype
*Chicago Review of Books*
Strange, profound, melancholy … In the final of Lincoln of the
Bardo, the realities of death and loss are faced head-on ...
Historical fiction will never be the same
*Newsday*
The author may have set out to write his first novel, but the work
he completed is a genre unto itself
*The Atlantic*
An unsentimental novel of Shakespearean proportions, gorgeously
stuffed with tragic characters, bawdy humor, terrifying visions,
throat-catching tenderness, and a galloping narrative
*Elle*
One of the strangest books of mainstream fiction around, competing
only with some of Saunders's own story collection for unbridled
inventiveness
*GQ*
A matterlightblooming phenomenon. Loud and big. Exploding with
grief and, more so, hope. And better left undescribed until you
yourself reach the end
*Time*
It’s only February but this will undoubtedly be considered one of
the best books of 2017
*Huffington Post*
Wonderfully bizarre and hilariously terrifying examination of the
ability to live and love
*Poets & Writers*
Moving and inventive tour de force
*Sunday Times*
Fiction taken to a new realm, and a work of sheer brilliance
*GQ*
This astounding novel pitches you into the strangest of places ...
Brilliant
*Psychologies*
Devastatingly moving
*People*
Along with the wonderfully bizarre, empathy abounds in Lincoln
*Time*
A strange, wise novel, truer in its expression than many ostensibly
historical novels
*New Humanist*
Tremendously moving ... Surpasses all expectations. This is a
masterpiece
*Sunday Express*
An urgently political, profoundly moral book, albeit one so playful
and so fantastical that the reader may hardly notice
*Economist*
A joyous, comically macabre exploration of love, death and loss ...
Bursting with life
*Bristol Post*
Saunders is defined by a crackling, electric kind of empathy; by
the kind of humbling understanding that simply comes from trying to
look further, understand more, know deeper
*The Brag*
A hands-down masterpiece – the subject of Abraham Lincoln and the
genius of this author is a perfect union … I wept while reading
this book. It is singular – I’ve never read anything quite like
it
*International New York Times*
I literally couldn’t put it down … Hilarious to poignant to really
moving
*Irish Country*
Surprising, daring, emotionally wrenching and warm-hearted
*Sunday Times, Summer Reading, ‘Our Top Five’*
Fact and fiction mingle in this affecting portrait of a grieving
president
*Financial Times, Summer Reading*
Best known for his critically acclaimed short stories, this is
Saunders’ first full-length novel, told with tenderness,
imagination and wit
*Zoe Apostolides, Daily Telegraph, Summer Reading*
It’s like a gothic, American Under Milk Wood
*The Times, Summer Reading*
Filled with wit and sadness … It is an immensely powerful work. In
the hands of the right imagination, the horror of individual loss
can become an extraordinarily humane exploration of the beauty and
the value of life, however painful
*Guardian*
I met the amazing George Saunders at a recent festival and can’t
wait to read Lincoln in the Bardo
*Anne Enright, Irish Times*
George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo is an extraordinary act of
poignant literary virtuosity about love, death, ghosts and history,
starring the grieving president
*Simon Sebag Montefiore, Evening Standard, Summer Reading*
I was won over by the sheer brio, writerly flourish and humanity of
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, which imagines a
disputatious convocation of the dead observing the US president as
he mourns his son
*Nick Curtis, Evening Standard, Summer Reading*
From his short stories, we might have expected Saunders’s
long-awaited first novel to be some sprawling vision of a future
America. In fact, it’s a historical novel – albeit one like no
other … It’s an admirable feat of style
*Daily Telegraph, Summer Reading*
I’ll be working my way on backwards through George Saunders, having
been hooked conclusively by Lincoln in the Bardo, tonal whimsies
and all. I’m presently on Tenth of December, but I expect to have
reached The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil by the time we go
on holiday
*Francis Spufford, Guardian, Summer Reading*
It revolves around the ghost of Abraham Lincoln’s son, who died
aged 11, and his fellows in the graveyard. There’s no single
narrator, but hundreds of different voices instead
*Daily Telegraph*
Unfolding in the graveyard over a single night, narrated by a
dazzling chorus of voices, Lincoln in the Bardo is a thrilling
exploration of death, grief and the deeper meaning and
possibilities of life
*Irish Times*
Huge excitement greeted this debut novel from the US short-story
master. Abraham Lincoln mourns his dead son, while other spirits in
the cemetery, hovering between life and death
*Guardian (Review)*
Picture a less fiery Purgatory with quirky ghost from Edward Gorey
materializing in the official video of Michael Jackson’s Thriller
and you get a flavour of this darkly comic metaphysical tale …
Saunders combines the larky and the macabre to wondrous effect …
Skilful juxtaposition of multiple viewpoints creates both
knockabout humour and deep anguish … Gloriously bonkers
*Sunday Telegraph*
It’s impossible to read Lincoln in the Bardo and not think of
America’s current convulsions, of the impossibility of reconciling
personal and public duty, of the harrowing, hollowing nature of
irreversible loss
*Observer*
Fantastical, funny and deeply affecting ... At a time when America
is divided, the book drills down to its early rupture … Saunders’
project has always been one of radical empathy: to forge
connections through the most unlikely means and in the most
unpromising contexts. In this book there is warmth mixed into the
weirdness; moral force behind the grotesquerie; and wild humour
amid the tragedy. One can safely say there’s never been a novel
like it
*Guardian*
In all his work, Saunders displays a knack for rendering abstract
concepts with a specificity that seems both fantastical and
familiar. No matter how strange the world of his fiction, at its
heart is always something sentimentally recognisable … He lets you
see the small moments of transition that a heart needs to keep
belief alive. At its heart, Lincoln in the Bardo is an exploration
of empathy
*Guardian*
One of the year’s most original and electrifying novels
*Economist, Books of the Year*
Few things live up to their hype, but the first novel by American
short-story writer George Saunders, which won the Booker Prize, is
a rare work of modern genius. Innovative, compelling, moving and
amusing, his story of squabbling spirits in the cemetery where
Abraham Lincoln has just laid to rest his young son captures the
human condition in a way only the greatest novelists can. Yes, it’s
that good
*Independent, Books of the Year*
The renowned short-story writer combined various forms from
historical letters, to footnotes to comic dialogue, into a moving –
if not entirely cohesive – story about loss, grief and our
unwillingness to let go
*Irish Times, Books of the Year*
You’ve never read anything like it. George Saunders takes risks.
The risks he takes are always playful and wise ... The way he does
things is almost spiritual, which is interesting – you don’t see
that much these days
*Irish Examiner, Books of the Year*
A haunting tour de force ... At once funny, heart-breaking and
utterly original
*Tablet, Books of the Year*
To nominate standout books I only had to think for a nanosecond:
with Lincoln in the Bardo George Saunders takes the novel by the
scruff of its neck, shakes loose then reassembles every single
component: voice, structure, plot, characterisation, even layout.
It's a brilliant and awe-inspiring performance, blackly comic,
deeply moving, unforgettable
*Sydney Morning Herald, Books of the Year 2017*
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