Vigil

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 ... Vigil is 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 experimentation and 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