George Saunders is back in the afterlife. ‘CivilWarLand in Bad Decline’, the opening short story of his 1996 debut collection of the same name, is set in an American Civil War-themed amusement park that is home to both a hologram of Jefferson Davis and a family of ghosts who worked the land while he was president. His first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, for which he was awarded the 2017 Booker Prize, takes place in the middle of that war, just after the death of Abe’s son Willie. The young Lincoln and his chatty fellow cemetery dwellers are caught in a transitional state between life and the hereafter. In ‘Sea Oak’, collected in Pastoralia (2000), the narrator’s aunt returns from the dead more judgemental, angrier and visibly decomposing. One of Saunders’s tricks is that he manages to squeeze every imaginable drop of humour out of these macabre set-ups, and often several unimaginable drops, too.

His new novel, Vigil, opens with the narrator, Jill ‘Doll’ Blaine, hurtling towards a mansion in Dallas, Texas. Its owner, oil tycoon K J Boone, is about to die. She must accompany him into the afterlife. Jill herself died aged twenty-two in 1976 and has provided this service to 343 other souls since. But she is not his only visitor from the great beyond. A persistent and unnamed Frenchman who invented the engine has also made the strenuous journey, and he is intent on forcing Boone to atone for his role in covering up the climate crisis. But Boone feels no regret for any of the lies he told, suspect scientific studies he funded or damage his company did to the planet – and his attitude shows no sign of changing.

Over the course of the day, several others whom Jill identifies as ‘of our ilk’ float into Boone’s room, some recruited by the French fellow to help his cause, some with their own agendas. These visits often prompt Jill to remember her own life ‘in that previous realm’, in which