Friday, April 26, 2019

Gary Moore on Blog Tour for Abe & Ann, June/July 2019

Posted By amy @ 10:09 am | No Comments

Abe & Ann
by Gary Moore

Publication Date: May 15, 2019
Komatik Press
eBook & Paperback; 220 Pages

Genre: Historical Fiction

 

 

ABE & ANN brings to life the little-known story of Abraham Lincoln’s passionate romance with Ann Rutledge when he was young and timid and hopelessly in love. Years later he would be enthroned in Washington after saving democracy, his wisdom and greatness legendary. 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.

Amazon | Barnes and Noble

Praise

“I love this book about the young, poverty-stricken, backwoods Abraham Lincoln courting his first love Ann Rutledge with nothing but grammar, the poetry of Byron, and hope. To me, ABE & ANN is quintessential historical fiction because it beautifully and eloquently upends our revered assumptions about a beloved historical figure. Too often, reputation preserves the famous in a fossilized amber that makes us forget the simple truth that people have to grow into those beloved reputations. But here, in ABE & ANN, in glorious, lilting prose, is Lincoln before he became the famous president we revere and thought we knew, in all his uncertain, love-struck, ambitious, underprivileged youth, wrapped in desire and struggling to find his way in the world.” -Robin Oliveira, New York Times bestselling author of My Name is Mary Sutter and winner of the Michael Shaara Prize in Civil War Fiction in 2010.

“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

“Gary Moore’s ABE & ANN presents the engrossing story of a young, rustic Lincoln’s resolute campaign for the heart of the lovely, brilliant Ann Rutledge. More than a vivid and tender romance both timeless and keenly evocative of its time, ABE & ANN is a passionate novel rendered in lyrical prose seldom found in historical fiction, one that will haunt you long after you have come to its exquisite, bittersweet conclusion.” -Don Bredes, author of Polly and the One and Only World

About the Author

Author Gary Moore is a playwright and poet who has been making creative use of Abraham Lincoln in drama, poetry, and performance art for more than thirty years. Gary’s bilingual musical in Shanghai, The Great Emancipator Meets The Monkey King, introduced rap-music to the People’s Republic of China six months before Tiananmen. His play based on that experience, Burning in China, sold out at the 2010 New York International Fringe Festival after being featured in the New York Times and recommended by the New Yorker. ABE & ANN, to be published by Komatik Press in May, 2019, is his first novel.

Website | Goodreads