Vigil

A wild ride through recent history, otherworldly reunions and good and evil – suitably big themes for one of America’s most distinguished and original writers * Spectator *
A tender morality tale … intrigue thrums everywhere * Observer *
The first must-read book of the year * Vogue *
Faulkner meets Citizen Kane... such is Saunders’ skill and empathetic imagination that the questions raised by his concocted other world... generally prove more mysterious than mystifying * Financial Times *
Staggering... Saunders has outdone himself with this endlessly irreverent work of art * Publishers Weekly *
Vigil… moves into even more anarchic and funny territory than that 2017 Booker-winning masterpiece with this new novel’s unhinged spirits and pitiful ghosts… a meditation on the manipulative nature of modern language… resonates deeply in our fractious, selfish age * Independent *
A magnificent expansion of consciousness... Saunders has crafted a novel that feels deeply resonant, especially in these fractious times * Kirkus Reviews *
Exquisitely strange and beautiful, devastating, and so, so funny. Nobody but George Saunders writes like this -- Meg Mason
With acuity and explosive imagination, Saunders takes on the gravest issues of our time: the menace of corporate greed * i Paper *
An imaginative, highly entertaining homage to A Christmas Carol * Mail on Sunday *
George Saunders, has produced his own riff on the story of George Bailey. Like Capra’s film, Vigil is a superbly wrought bit of sentimental fantasy that shades gradually into something darker and more troubling * Irish Times *
The prose zips with the author’s trademark wisecracks and quick-fire repartee … at a time when doomsayers predict the demise of the novel – destined, supposedly, to be seen off by glitzier distractions and dwindling attention spans – Mr Saunders has a recipe for fiction’s survival, as well as a rationale for reading it. Finding new ways to tell stories with words on a page, his work nudges forward the boundaries of the form. He powers his empathy machine with restless invention * Economist *
He writes in a way that is so engaging and beautiful ... so immersive and incredible but also brutal * Viv Groskop *
He boils down this vast global problem to an emotion ... he has an enormous empathy that extends to all sorts of people * Tom Sutcliffe *
Anyone familiar with Saunders’s work – either Lincoln or his several books of tragicomic short stories that preceded it – will know to expect something unusual, and he doesn’t disappoint * Irish Times *
Formidable. The sentences snap and pivot; jokes arrive, then suddenly float into a colder register. He can turn celestial paperwork into something like tragedy ... a theatrical moral fable * Irish Independent *
Elegant and witty ... Vigil is a finely crafted novel that explores comfort, repentance, and the path to redemption, which must be sought again and again * Irish Examiner *
Brimming with the compassion and insight that has won Saunders legion of fans, it eschews caricature in favour of profound empathy ... it’s also funny and vivid and populated with endearing nutcases * Shakespeare & Co. podcast *
It’s an extraordinary book; the work of a modern master with a full-spectrum understanding of fantastic fiction * SFX *
Shares hilarity with sadness and meditates on redemption – or, more pertinently, a lack of it ... demands more than a single read * Buzz *
Vintage Saunders * Restless Magazine *
This century’s Vonnegut … we will be reading it again and again – and if that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know... * Bookmunch *
The real moral of the story comes from its exposure of the excuses and rationalisations by which Boone justifies his actions * Otago Daily Times *
Anyone who loves George Saunders’s writing can tell you about his wicked imagination: luminous, dark, wholly original, and quite frequently supernatural ... The twin currents that run through these and all of his works, including his newest novel, Vigil, about a spirit tending to a dying oil executive, is large-heartedness paired with unsparing wit. Saunders is funny. Hilarious even * The Atlantic *
Vibrant, fiendishly clever ... Vigil is leaner than Lincoln in the Bardo, but no less revelatory in its grasp of history and humanity, how and why our lives are shaped by politics that whorl around us ... Saunders varies pointillist technique with staccato dialogue, slapstick humor, even touches of horror. It’s all thrilling on the page ... Vigilis pure Saunders: the death of empathy, he insists, is greatly exaggerated. He pushes back, a burst of surprises and sudden grace * Boston Globe *
As the winner of the Booker Prize, Saunders sets a high bar, and his latest easily clears it. Vigil explores the act of dying: what you regret, who you apologize to, and what you are proudest of. Saunders also imagines dying in an evocative, active way while also making time to explore capitalism, greed, and everything else you might regret in your last hours * Harper's Bazaar *
Saunders tucks stories within stories, his prose rich with daring experimentationand his trademark compassion * TIME *
It seems unfair that, after his spectacular Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders returns with not just another novel featuring a ghost, but with a new novel even more spectacular than the last. ‘Who else could you have been but exactly who you are?’ says the newly incarnated Jill ‘Doll’ Blaine, sent to comfort nefarious oil tycoon K. J. Boone in his last hours alive, a statement that in no way diminishes the political urgency of this spare, lovely book * Los Angeles Times *
Saunders doing capitalism, climate, and the afterlife in one swing? Sold * Oprah Daily *
The bard of the afterlife returns with Vigil, a slim yet existentially complex novel about a woman guiding an oil company CEO to death in his waning hours. George Saunders has long been one of the writers best equipped to explore despicable people with clear-eyed compassion, and in his latest he takes aim at his toughest task yet ... tender yet unsparing * Chicago Review of Books *