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Lincoln in the Bardo is based on the 2017 Booker Prize-winning novel by George Saunders, hailed by many critics as one of the best novels of the decade:In 1862 President Lincoln, tormented by the idea that he has been responsible for the deaths of thousands of young men in the civil war, loses his eleven year-old son Willie to typhoid. The novel (and the opera) begins in a Georgetown cemetery with a robust and talkative population of ghosts, all of whom are thrown into a state of chaos and questioning with Willie’s arrival and the President’s subsequent visits. Children do not fare well in this “bardo”, the space between life and death, and the ghosts become concerned with getting the boy on to “the next place”. Their endless banter, Willie’s refreshing straightforwardness and Lincoln’s grief combine to illuminate fundamental questions about loss, sacrifice and humanity, all set against the backdrop of a volatile and divided nation.
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