Ward, author of Savage the Bones, The Men We Reaped and the new Sing, Unburied, Sing, says that she and George Saunders (author of the Booker-winning Lincoln in the Bardo) may both be writing about the spirit world right now for similar reasons: “Many people in power are attempting to rewrite the past and the present to fit their narrative. Writing about spirits is a way to counteract some of that, because the people of the past are allowed to be present in the moment and tell their own (true) stories, and often, there is a reckoning between the living and the dead.”