Mary, Mrs. A. Lincoln

A novel about the life of Mary Todd Lincoln, narrated by the First Lady herself, a USA Today choice for Best Historical Fiction of the Year.   The wife of Abraham Lincoln is one of history's most misunderstood and enigmatic women. She was a political strategist, a supporter of emancipation, and a mother who survived the loss of three children and the assassination of her beloved husband. She also ran her family into debt, held seances in the White House, and was committed to an insane asylum—which is where Janis Cooke Newman's debut novel begins.   From her room in Bellevue Place, Mary chronicles her tempestuous childhood in a slaveholding Southern family and takes readers through the years after her husband's death, revealing the ebbs and flows of her passion and depression, her poverty and ridicule, and her ultimate redemption, in a novel that is both a fascinating look at a nineteenth-century woman's experience and "an old-fashioned pleasure to read" ( The Plain Dealer).   A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist