A secret passion. An Abraham Lincoln you don’t know. Not the god enthroned in Washington. A young man timid with one change of clothes. The one who hiked into a prairie village and met a girl there, and his path to love, and his path to greatness, began. Was it all 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 village where the 22-year-old Lincoln comes looking for work. She is lively and literate and funny, and Abe is 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 the greatness growing within him.

“This lyrical novel of the young Lincoln in love not only kept me turning the pages until the wee hours of the night, it also grabbed me as all the best stories do, less a tapestry of a particular time than a universal story of what it means to love and to lose. Gary Moore has written a moving tribute to how the most intimate of experiences can forever change us, and sometimes change the world.”

Thomas Christopher Greene, author of The Headmaster’s Wife and The Perfect Liar