What to Read After Lincoln in the Bardo
If George Saunders's novel left you wanting more books about the dead hovering near the living, love that won't release its grip, and grief that turns the afterlife into a waiting room, these four novels are the right next descent.
Finished Lincoln in the Bardo? Start here next.
If Lincoln in the Bardo stayed with you, it was probably because it treated death as neither closure nor spectacle. George Saunders gives us souls stalled beside their unfinished lives, still clinging to desire, habit, shame, and above all the unbearable fact of love that has nowhere sensible to go.
The best follow-ups keep that same ache alive. They linger in the charged space where the dead refuse to leave, the living cannot quite let them go, and moving on starts to feel less like healing than betrayal.
An Unexpected Afterlife
Dan Sofer — The Dry Bones Society, Book 1
Moshe Karlin wakes in modern Jerusalem after dying, only to discover that resurrection is less a clean miracle than a public emergency. He wants desperately to win back his wife, but as more of the dead return across the city, ordinary bureaucracy starts colliding with ancient sacred prophecy, turning his private longing into part of a much larger End-Times crisis.
What makes Dan Sofer's novel such a strong next read here is the way it lets humor and heart coexist with metaphysical dread. The dead do not return to a neatly waiting world; they come back to paperwork, confusion, unfinished marriages, and a city forced to absorb the sacred into daily life. It carries the same emotional question Saunders leaves echoing behind him: what happens when love refuses to accept the border between here and gone?
The Leftovers
by Tom Perrotta
Tom Perrotta approaches absence from the other side of the wound: the dead do not linger physically, but their disappearance saturates every room and relationship anyway. Like Saunders, he is fascinated by how grief curdles into ritual, delusion, stubborn attachment, and the refusal to keep living in an ordinary register after loss has made ordinary life feel obscene.
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Replay
by Ken Grimwood
Replay turns second chances into a haunting of another kind. Jeff Winston keeps dying and returning to an earlier version of his life, carrying memory like a private ghost and learning that love, regret, and missed tenderness do not dissolve just because time resets. If what drew you to Lincoln in the Bardo was its sense of souls trapped by unfinished feeling, Grimwood's novel scratches that same ache through repetition rather than purgatory.
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The Lovely Bones
by Alice Sebold
Alice Sebold's Susie Salmon watches the living from just beyond reach, unable to sever herself from the family and life she lost. The novel shares Saunders's gift for making the afterlife feel intimate rather than ornamental: a place shaped by yearning, unfinished love, and the painful knowledge that the dead may hover close even as the living begin, however reluctantly, to move on.
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