Pre-order the latest book from the Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo – a playful, wise, electric novel 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

'He will be read long after these times have passed' Zadie Smith

Not for the first time, Jill “Doll” Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favourite 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-three 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, clamouring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man’s room, a black calf grazes on the loveseat, a man from a distant drought-ravaged village materialises, 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 that encompasses life and death, good and evil, and the thorny question of absolution.