As Lincoln mourns at his son's crypt, he unwittingly enters a supernatural realm filled with ghosts unable to move on due to unresolved issues from their lives.

These spirits, including significant figures like Hans Vollman, Roger Bevins III, and Reverend Everly Thomas, deliver the story through fragmented monologues.

They witness Lincoln's deep sorrow and strive to assist Willie in transitioning to the afterlife, concerned that his attachment to his father may imprison him in this purgatorial state indefinitely.

[8][9] In a climactic sequence, the ghosts gather to inhabit Lincoln's body, experiencing his thoughts and emotions while urging him to let go of Willie.

I carried that image around for the next 20-odd years, too scared to try something that seemed so profound, and then finally, in 2012, noticing that I wasn't getting any younger, not wanting to be the guy whose own gravestone would read "Afraid to Embark on Scary Artistic Project He Desperately Longed to Attempt", decided to take a run at it, in exploratory fashion, no commitments.

Saunders first announced the novel in a 2015 New York Times interview with the novelist Jennifer Egan, revealing that it would have a "supernatural element" while remaining "ostensibly historical".

[21] In a The New Yorker Radio Hour podcast with David Remnick, Saunders described how a melancholic Lincoln the Mystic statue, sculpted by James Earle Fraser, propelled him through the novel.

He worried about his ability to portray Lincoln, but decided that limiting his characterization to a single night made the writing process "not easy, but easier, because I knew just where he was in his trajectory as president".

[25] Much of the novel takes place in the bardo, a Tibetan term for the Buddhist "intermediate state" between death and reincarnation when the consciousness is not connected to a body.

In Saunders's conception, the "ghosts" that inhabit the bardo are "disfigured by desires they failed to act upon while alive" and are threatened by permanent entrapment in the liminal space.

The selection of the term "bardo", he said, was "partly to help the reader not to bring too many preconceptions to it... in a book about the afterlife, it's good to destabilize all of the existing beliefs as much as you can.

[34][26][35] Tim Martin, writing for Literary Review, compared its "babble of American voices", some from primary sources and some expertly fabricated, with the last act of Thornton Wilder's play Our Town.

[39] Other notable narrators include David Sedaris, Carrie Brownstein, Lena Dunham, Keegan-Michael Key, Miranda July, Ben Stiller, Bradley Whitford, Bill Hader, Mary Karr, Jeffrey Tambor, Kat Dennings, Jeff Tweedy, and Patrick Wilson.