Interview | Booker Prize-winning author George Saunders on his new novel, Vigil

The Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) returns with another ghost story, Vigil (published by Bloomsbury). If you lift that lid even a little bit, you want to push it down because you can’t imagine doing that again .There’s this Tolstoy story, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. When I’m starting, I’m not thinking of any of this. Q: Could you tell us what the years of writing Vigil were like? But writing Vigil was, perhaps, less straightforwardly enjoyable because of everything going on, but, strangely, it might have been helpful for the book.