Bookshop Santa Cruz presents: George Saunders | VIGIL

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ABOUT THE EVENT + TICKETS:

• This in-person event will feature a book talk and audience Q&A, followed by a book signing (more information on signing is below). 

• Each ticket costs $34, including all tax and payment processing fees.

• Ticket package includes the event plus signed hardcover edition of the book (distributed at the event).

• Books will be pre-signed; the event will also be followed by a signing line if you would like your copy personalized. Please note that the author is only able to sign copies of VIGIL—no books from home will be signed. Thank you for understanding!

• Books uncollected at the event will be held for pickup at Bookshop Santa Cruz for two months, after which they will be released back to the store.

• Tickets do not qualify for Readers Club credit. All sales are final.

• This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz

Thank you! We can't wait to see you at the event! 

ABOUT THE BOOK + AUTHOR:

VIGIL is a wise, playful, electric novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling, 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 343 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 postdeath 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 that encompasses life and death, good and evil, and the thorny question of absolution.

George Saunders is the author of thirteen books, including the novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize, and five collections of stories, including Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the recent collection Liberation Day (selected by former President Obama as one of his ten favorite books of 2022). Three of Saunders’s books—Pastoralia, Tenth of December, and Lincoln in the Bardo—were chosen for The New York Times’s list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Saunders hosts the popular Story Club on Substack, which grew out of his book on the Russian short story, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. In 2013, he was named one of the world’s 100 Most Influential People by Time. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.