ABE and ANN A Novel

Abraham Lincoln's face is on the penny and the five-dollar bill. His name graces towns and schools and luxury motor cars. In Washington, he is a seated god twenty feet tall in his marble temple. He ended slavery and brought our country through a civil war. What if it all was because of a woman? Auburn-haired Ann Rutledge, feisty and fed-up with propriety, is frontier royalty, the 18-year-old daughter of the founder of the rough little frontier village of New Salem, Illinois, where the 22-year-old Abe Lincoln comes looking for work. She is lively and literate and funny, and Abe is straight off his daddy's farm with jug ears and one change of clothes. Homely and poor, but full of high ambition, Lincoln courts the dazzling red-haired woman who comes into his life like a revelation. In the spell of their feelings, the lovers question the limits in their lives and boldly dream of a better future. But she is engaged to another man. Readers who enjoyed Doris Kearns Goodwin's bestselling Lincoln book Team of Rivals, Steven Spielberg's blockbuster film Lincoln, and George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo will marvel again at this very different and compelling tale of Lincoln as a young man. Not a grand historical treatment but a lyrical telling of a deeply personal tale, ABE & ANN dares to give readers an earnest but untutored Lincoln whose humanity every reader can share, who was weak before he was strong, frightened before he was bold, and deeply in love with a woman whose admiration confirmed his belief in the greatness within him.