Prepare to reenter the bardo or something like it: George Saunders is releasing a new novel that takes place in another liminal zone between life and death. Vigil, which Random House will publish on January 27, 2026, follows the deathbed journey and moral accounting of oil company CEO K.J. Boone. He is ferried to the afterlife by Jill “Doll” Blaine, who has been ushering the newly dead to their next destination since her own demise in the ’70s. “As Boone races toward death, visitors (worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead) arrive, clamoring for a reckoning,” per the novel’s jacket copy.
Vigil and Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders’s 2017 novel about the death of Abraham Lincoln’s young son, can be described as companion pieces, according to the author. “And there’s a third on the way (I think, I hope),” he said in an email to Vulture. “The afterlife in the two books are a little different — different rules apply — but I feel like I’m using ‘what comes next’ to understand with more precision what’s happening now.” The novel came to be because he found himself wondering “about that generation of climate-change deniers who, through obfuscation and spin, put progress on hold for 20 or 30 years, and are now old and passing away. I wondered whether such a person might, at the end of his life, feel inclined to repentance. If he had a chance to explain himself, would he try? Could he even do it?”
The novel, he hopes, approaches a political topic without restricting itself to an expression of opinion. “It’s like Chekhov said — art doesn’t have to solve a problem, it just has to formulate it correctly,” Saunders says. “So instead of saying, ‘Here, world, here’s my fully formed opinion,’ you end up taking yourself on a little trip in the direction of more complexity, more ambiguity, a deeper understanding. In this sense, the product is even more political, because it’s charged, not only with opinion (possibly anger), but also with some sympathy.”
Saunders, a former MacArthur and Guggenheim fellow, winner of the Booker Prize, prolific Substacker, and best-selling favorite of Barack Obama and Dua Lipa, has published many books, including short-story collections, novellas, and one children’s picture book; this will be his 13th. And he did it without his writing shed.