About This Book
On the night Abraham Lincoln visits the Georgetown cemetery where his eleven-year-old son Willie has just been buried, something extraordinary holds in the air around them — a liminal space between death and whatever comes next, populated by souls unwilling or unable to move on. Set against the backdrop of a nation tearing itself apart, this novel asks what grief does to a person, and what love demands of the living. It is intimate and cosmic at once, a father's anguish set against the vast machinery of history.
Saunders builds the novel from fragments — historical documents, eyewitness accounts (some real, some invented), and a cacophony of voices from the dead themselves, each carrying their own unfinished business into the afterlife. The form is unlike anything else in American fiction: part collage, part séance, part dark comedy. Reading it requires surrendering to its rhythms, and the reward is a book that accumulates tremendous emotional force through accumulation rather than conventional narrative. Saunders has always been a precise, strange, deeply humane writer, and here that sensibility finds its fullest expression.
