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The novel’s speaking voices are punctuated with historical description, some authentic, some invented, all perfectly judged. So the division of the country, the division between slave and free, is mirrored in a division between this world and the next. There the spirits who inhabit the cemetery, and whose polyphonic chorus powers this beautiful book, encounter Lincoln the living man: his presence forces them to confront the fact of their own deaths. He is laid to rest in a borrowed crypt in Oak Hill Cemetery, Washington, where the president, alone, repeatedly visits the still body of his beloved son. In Lincoln in the Bardo, little Willie Lincoln dies but that is just the beginning of the story. And that collection, like this novel, is populated not only by the living, but by the dead. Although much of that first book was set in the not-too-distant future, it is clear from the title alone that the cataclysm of a riven nation was already on his mind.

But as far back as his debut in 1996, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Saunders’s unusual sensibility has been apparent: a blend of humour and serious intent so finely balanced as to seem almost a magic trick. British readers may have come across his commencement speech to Syracuse University’s graduating class of 2013, a viral hit online that was published the following year as Congratulations, by the way: Some Thoughts on Kindness. Consequently, his name is less well known in Britain, even though his last book, The Tenth of December, won the inaugural Folio Prize in 2014. Saunders is a literary hero in his native land – this novel went straight to the top of the New York Times fiction bestseller list – but until now he had published only short stories by way of fiction. Keckley’s words can be found threaded through George Saunders’s astonishing first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. I did not dream that his rugged nature could be so moved.” “His grief unnerved him, and made him a weak, passive child. “I stood at the foot of the bed, my eyes full of tears, looking at the man in silent, awe-stricken wonder,” she wrote. Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave who was Mary’s seamstress and friend, left an account of the president’s grief. But Willie was the Lincolns’ blue-eyed boy, their darling.

The couple were no stranger to grief their son Edward had died at the age of three in 1850, not long before Willie was born. But in February 1862 death came to Abraham and Mary Lincoln’s door when their 11-year-old son, Willie, died of typhoid fever. From 1861 to 1865 the United States were the divided states, riven by a war whose horror has not faded. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Abraham Lincoln had said – and the biblical prediction had been proved right. From Virginia to Tennessee, from east to west and from north to south, war was raging.

Lincoln in the bardo audio book