Vigil
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A scorching portrait of modern America. And yet it also brings a sense of sense of hope, not only because [it] reminds us how powerful a great novel can be, but because of the sense . . . that a universal justice will prevail.”—R. J. Palacio for Time, “25 Books That Capture This American Moment”
A “spectacular” (Los Angeles Times) novel from the Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo, taking place at the bedside of an oil company CEO in the twilight hours of his life as he is ferried from this world into the next
“Vibrant, fiendishly clever . . . Vigil is pure Saunders: the death of empathy, he insists, is greatly exaggerated.”—The Boston Globe
Not for the first time, Jill “Doll” Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion.
She has performed this sacred duty 343 times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this charge, she soon discovers, isn’t like the others. The powerful K. J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold, epic life, and the world is better for it. Isn’t it?
Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of a complicated man. Visitors begin to arrive (worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead), clamoring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man’s room; a black calf grazes on the love seat; a man from a distant, drought-ravaged village materializes; two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for Boone’s postdeath future.
With the wisdom, playfulness, and explosive imagination we’ve come to expect, George Saunders takes on the gravest issues of our time—the menace of corporate greed, the toll of capitalism, the environmental perils of progress—and, in the process, spins a tale that encompasses life and death, good and evil, and the thorny question of absolution.
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George Saunders
George Saunders is the author of nine books, including Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and won the inaugural Folio Prize (for the best work of fiction in English) and the Story Prize (best short story collection). He has received MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, the PEN/Malamud Prize for excellence in the short story, and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time magazine. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University.
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