Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. A few years ago, my wife's grandfather died,

and we had to drive over to his place in New Jersey to help clean out the house. If you've ever done

anything like that, you know it's a bit of a referendum on someone's life. Some items trigger

happy, pleasant memories, others, not so much.

And you have to wonder what it must be like to look back on your own life, to tally up the score, so to speak.

That's exactly what happens in George Saunders' novel, Vigil.

It's about an oil tycoon on his deathbed visited by a series of ghosts.

And if that sounds a bit like a Christmas carol to you, well, you're not totally wrong.

But Saunders tells Emperor Scott Dedra that he's inspired by a lot of stories about death and dying

because the questions we ask ourselves on our deathbed should be the ones we ask every day.

That's ahead.

Author George Saunders thinks a lot about death and the afterlife. It was the focus of his

2017 novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. He vividly remembers the first time the topic entered

his mind. He was about seven years old visiting his grandparents in Amarillo, Texas.

I just was awake and I could hear them breathing.

And it just struck me that, you know, they seemed to me quite old, and I knew old people died.

And that when that breath stopped, then I would lose them, you know.

And I had nobody to ask about that, and I just lay there thinking about it.

As a kid, he says he developed a love-hate relationship with how finite life is, and he has continued to explore the world of ghosts and death in his new book, Vigil, which takes place in the final hours

of K.J. Boone's life. He's an oil tycoon who undercut the science of climate change. As Boone

dies, he is visited by a series of ghosts, everyone from the French

inventor of the internal combustion engine, who has arrived at Boone's deathbed seeking justice,

...