Is Lincoln in the Bardo Worth Reading?
Ada’s Score
Saunders builds his novel entirely from voices — a cacophony of ghosts stranded in a Washington cemetery on the night Abraham Lincoln visits his dead son's crypt. The form is audacious: fragmented testimonies, historical quotations, and invented confessions layered into something that reads like a séance conducted on the page. What makes it succeed is the emotional precision beneath the formal experiment. Grief, political weight, and the absurdity of clinging to an unlived life converge with surprising tenderness. Anyone drawn to language that earns its strangeness will find this essential.
Deep Dive“It asks you to hold so many voices at once. Surrender to the noise and you'll find, at the center, a father and his son and a grief with no bottom.”
When Grief Refuses to Let Go: Saunders in the Bardo
George Saunders built a novel out of voices — dozens of them, restless and howling — and somehow made the most experimental book of the decade feel like the most human one. Lincoln in the Bardo asks what it costs a father, a president, a nation to let the dead go. We're talking about why this Booker Prize winner broke readers wide open, and why its strange, plural form is actually the only shape grief could take.
Ada Brief
AI reading intelligence“It asks you to hold so many voices at once. Surrender to the noise and you'll find, at the center, a father and his son and a grief with no bottom.”
When Grief Refuses to Let Go: Saunders in the Bardo
George Saunders built a novel out of voices — dozens of them, restless and howling — and somehow made the most experimental book of the decade feel like the most human one. Lincoln in the Bardo asks what it costs a father, a president, a nation to let the dead go. We're talking about why this Booker Prize winner broke readers wide open, and why its strange, plural form is actually the only shape grief could take.
Book Details
- Publisher
- Random House Trade Paperbacks
- Published
- January 1, 2018
- Pages
- 368
- Language
- English
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Ada’s Score
3.9
Ada’s editorial score — not an aggregate of reader reviews.
Common Questions About Lincoln in the Bardo
- Is Lincoln in the Bardo worth reading?
- It asks you to hold so many voices at once. Surrender to the noise and you'll find, at the center, a father and his son and a grief with no bottom. Ada rates it 3.9 out of 5.
- How many pages is Lincoln in the Bardo?
- Lincoln in the Bardo is 368 pages long — around 7–8 hours at an average reading pace.
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