Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo, and one of Time’s one hundred most influential people in the world, George Saunders writes books that are both irreverent and momentous—and utterly unique. To read his work is to grow “more empathetic” (San Francisco Chronicle), and to “feel as though you are reading fiction for the first time” (Khaled Hosseini). He joins us in Vancouver with his anticipated new novel, Vigil.
Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of a complicated man: an oil company CEO in the twilight hours of his life. Visitors begin to arrive (worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead), clamoring for a reckoning.
With the wisdom, playfulness, 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.
Saunders speaks with acclaimed author Alix Ohlin, whose work has been shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Both authors are also revered writing instructors—Saunders at Syracuse University, and Ohlin at the University of British Columbia—and this conversation, followed by an audience Q+A, will be filled with essential insights for readers and writers, and all of us living through these patently absurd times.
Books will be for sale at the event by our official bookseller Book Warehouse, a division of Black Bond Books, with a signing after the event.