The accounts intersperse the graveyard chatter of the

ghosts, intertwining fact and fiction.

The graveyard babbling, often endless, bawdy and even vulgar, also gives the reader glimpses of race tension in the war-fraught country.

"And many was the time I pounded my lust out in the Night to good Result; pounding my good Wife or, if she was indisposed, pounding my SHARDS, whom I called SHARDS, for they were, indeed, dark as Night, unto so many SHARDS of COAL..." according to a lieutenant Cecil Stone's account.

Set in a Dante-esque milieu, with the dead and living occupying centerstage, Saunders' novel paints a picture of loss and the pain of waiting, for the living and the deceased.

One such suffering was of Willie's mother who appears to be in denial of her child's death.

"Where was her boy? she kept asking. Where was he? Couldn't someone find him, bring him to her at once? Mustn't he yet be somewhere?" says a maid's account talking about Willie's mother.

This state of waiting for the next stage, locked in a state of 'nothingness' is also how the bereaved President is described.

The portrayal of the President prostrated with grief, putting his presidential duties to the background, is one that contradicts conventional narratives of how a state leader, that too one faced with a war, must behave.

Saunders captures Lincoln's grief most poignantly: "'I had thought not to come here again'. Thus thought Mr Lincoln. 'Yet here I am. One last look'."

His reluctance to leave the remains of his beloved son clashes with the stoic image a president at the helm of a country heading into war must have.

The over 300-page novel published by Bloomsbury, is a confrontation with the mysterious beyond the inevitable death, a question that has haunted humankind, and the way death can bring even the head of a nation to his knees.

(This article has not been edited by DNA's editorial team and is auto-generated from an agency feed.)