A Vibrant Full Audiobook Cast Reads George Saunders’s New Novel

When George Saunders’s #1 New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize–winning Lincoln In the Bardo was published as an audiobook in 2017, it took the listening world by storm with its cast of  166 (!) narrators. Now Saunders returns with Vigil, an electric new novel that explores the space between this life and the next, and the audiobook has already garnered an Earphones Award from Kirkus Audiobook Reviews, who raved, “This brief and brilliant audiobook is compelling and wildly imaginative.”

Featuring a full cast of award-winning narrators, Vigil kicks off with Jill “Doll” Blaine hurtling toward earth, towards yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife. She has performed this duty 343 times since her own death, and her charges, as a rule, have been 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, epic life, and the world is better for it… Isn’t it?

With the wisdom, playfulness, 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.

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