What an astonishing work of fiction. I bounced off Lincoln the first time I tried to read it, a few months back (even after discovering how amazing Tenth of December is), bogging down in the first 20 pages in the description of the Lincolns' party, but if I'd pressed on just a few more pages to reach the scene in which Hans Vollman and Roger Bevins III meet the newly arrived Willie Lincoln, with its mixture of comedy, feeling and interesting exposition, I wouldn't have looked back. From then on, the novel - if that's the right word for it - races forward, its chamber of voices entwining in increasingly powerful and moving ways, maintaining both a simplicity of vision and construction (including in how it deals with the voices of the African American slaves) and a rewarding complexity across its many threads. Emotionally forceful, intellectually questing, morally rigorous; marvellous and humane.
