Vigil
In his first novel since the Booker Prize–winning Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders follows Jill Blaine — known as Doll — a woman no longer among the living whose task is to escort the newly dead from Earth toward whatever waits beyond. When she must usher a dying oil executive across that threshold, Saunders brings his singular moral imagination to bear on judgment, mercy, and the reckoning of a single human life.
The narrative takes place within a purgatorial netherworld that some readers and critics have identified as a return to the same spiritual landscape featured in the author's earlier novel, Lincoln in the Bardo.
The story is a standalone work and does not require knowledge of any other books to follow the plot.
