Pre-order the latest book from the Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo - a
playful wise electric novel 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 'He will be read
long after these times have passed' Zadie Smith Not for the first time Jill "Doll" Blaine
finds herself hurtling toward earth reconstituting as she falls right down to her favourite
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 three hundred and forty-three 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 life and the world is better for it. Isn't it? Vigil transports
us careening through the wild final evening of an epic complicated life. Crowds of people
and animals - worldly and otherworldly alive and dead - arrive clamouring for a reckoning.
Birds swarm the dying man's room a black calf grazes on the loveseat a man from a distant
drought-ravaged village materialises two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with
chilling plans for Boone's post-death future. With the acuity 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.
