The American short story writer George Saunders has won the Man Booker prize for his first full-length novel,
Lincoln in the Bardo. The book is based on a real-life event – the death of Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son Willie in 1862. Shattered by grief and imagining the boy trapped in the Bardo – a Tibetan Buddhist term for a kind of limbo – Lincoln paces the graveyard on the eve of the boy’s burial. The book intersperses historical accounts, both real and imagined, with monologues from a cast of ghosts watching over the boy in the after-life.
The other shortlisted titles for the 2017 award were
4321 by Paul Auster
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
Elmet by Fiona Mozley
Autumn by Ali Smith
No comments:
Post a Comment