How long does it take to read Lincoln in the Bardo?
George Saunders, Amir Tsukerman
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, Amir Tsukerman takes about 7 hours 49 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 7 hours 49 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2017. 426 pages, about 117,150 words.
16 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 13 hours 1 minute |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 7 hours 49 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 53 minutes |
The page count is the median across 21 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. "My poor boy, he was too good for this earth," the president says at the time. "God has called him home." Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy's body. From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins a story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state -- called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo -- a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie's soul.
Subjects: FICTION / Ghost, Presidents, Biographical fiction, Fiction, Grief, Historical fiction
