"From the seed of historical truth that is the death of President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son Willie, George Saunders spins a story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural ...

Lincoln in the Bardo was quite simply an incredible work of fable-building. This was one of the few unanimous homeruns for NUBClub. This story of two ghosts trying to help save a young dead child that happens to be the son of President Lincoln was breathtaking in its style and its structure. To start with, all of us found the base mythology stunningly good. The vision of ghosts as grotesque caricatures of their obsessions, the call of the reapers and how the ghosts resisted passing on, the fate of being trapped and losing oneself -- all of the came together into a beautiful vision of what unfinished lives could be. At the same time, Saunders weaves that mythology into a meditation on loss: Lincoln's loss of his child and the ways he must come to terms with it to get back to a critical moment of his presidency, when he is seen as responsible for the loss of so much life; the way Bevins, Vollman and Early realize that they must sacrifice their own rabid hold on their pasts to save Willie from annihilation; the foils of the other ghosts, welded to objects or reliving their pasts as they wander the graveyard. A simultaneously heartbreaking and uplifting work, Saunders manages to do something that few NUBClub reads have: craft a powerful, consistent storyworld with a heroic plot and tie it to a gorgeous literally style and set of themes. Bravo, Mr. Saunders. You have earned your Man Booker, and NUBClub's unending respect.