A wise, playful, electric novel from the #1 New York Times best-selling, Booker
Prize-–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo, taking place at the bedside of an oil
company CEO, in the twilight hours of his life, as he is ferried from this world into
the next.
Not for the first time, Jill “Doll” Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting
as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest
charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the
circular drive of his ornate mansion.
She has performed this sacred duty three hundred and forty-three343 times since her own
death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly 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 life, and the world is
better for it. Isn’t it?
Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of an epic, complicated life.
Crowds of people and animals—worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead—arrive,
clamoring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man’s room, a black calf grazes on the
love seat, a man from a distant, drought-ravaged village materializes, two oil-business
cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for Boone’s post-death future.
With the acuity 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 t
