Lincoln in the Bardo (Signed First Edition)

SAUNDERS, George. Lincoln in the Bardo. New York: Random House, 2017.

8vo. Original black and blue paper-covered boards. Original unclipped dust jacket. 341 pp. First edition, first printing. Signed by the author to the title page. Includes print-out of the ticket for the author signing event at which this copy was inscribed.

George Saunders (b. 1958) had spent more than two decades establishing himself as one of the most acclaimed short story writers in American letters — a MacArthur "Genius Grant" recipient and a four-time National Magazine Award winner for fiction — before publishing Lincoln in the Bardo in February 2017: his first full-length novel, arriving with an unusual weight of expectation for a writer who had built his reputation entirely on the shorter form. The novel more than met that expectation. It debuted as a New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller and went on, in October of the same year, to win the Booker Prize — only the third time in the prize's history that an American author had received it, following the rule change permitting non-Commonwealth writers to compete.

The novel is set on a single night in February 1862, in the immediate aftermath of the death of Willie Lincoln, the eleven-year-old son of President Abraham Lincoln, from typhoid fever during the darkest early period of the Civil War. Saunders was inspired by an account, since substantiated by contemporary newspaper reports, that the grieving president visited his son's crypt at Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown on more than one occasion to hold the boy's embalmed body. From this single, almost unbearably intimate historical detail, Saunders constructs a novel unlike anything else in contemporary literature: the bulk of the narrative unfolds in the bardo, the intermediate state between death and rebirth described in Tibetan Buddhist tradition, where Willie's arriving spirit encounters a raucous, grotesque, and unexpectedly tender community of the cemetery's other dead, each unable or unwilling to acknowledge that they have, in fact, died.

The novel's formal structure is genuinely without precedent: chapters assembled from fragments of invented testimony from the cemetery's ghostly residents, interleaved with an intricate collage of real and invented historical sources — letters, memoirs, newspaper accounts, and scholarly histories — describing Lincoln, his grief, and the war unfolding beyond the cemetery gates. The Booker Prize judges praised the novel's innovation and its "juxtaposition of the very personal tragedy of Abraham Lincoln and the death of his very young son" against the vast public catastrophe of a war that would ultimately claim an estimated 750,000 lives. Colson Whitehead, reviewing the novel for the New York Times, wrote that he had "never read anything like it," while Michiko Kakutani described it as a portrait of "a president haunted by grief" of extraordinary emotional precision.

The novel's cultural presence has only grown since publication: it has been translated into more than a dozen languages, adapted for an celebrated full-cast audiobook production, and was announced in February 2026 to be the basis of a forthcoming feature film from Playtone, with Tom Hanks cast in the role of Abraham Lincoln — news that has renewed interest in the novel considerably. Lincoln in the Bardo remains Saunders's most significant and most widely read work, and the book that transformed one of America's most admired short story writers into a Booker Prize-winning novelist as well.

Near fine. Dust jacket fine, preserved in mylar cover. Bindings near fine, one small bump to front cover upper spine crease. Contents fine, free from markings. Includes print-out of the author signing event ticket at which this copy was inscribed.

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Catalogue Number: HH000012