Brown Bag Book Club: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Pick up a copy of "Lincoln in the Bardo" by George Saunders at Healdsburg Regional Library and join us Tuesday, March 1st at noon for lively conversation.

President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely illustrations In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. "My poor boy, he was too good for this earth," the president says at the time. "God has called him home." Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy's body. From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins a story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state -- called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo -- a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie's soul.