#3 – A Friend of Mr. Lincoln by Stephen Harrigan – 2025 Best Reads

It’s 1832 when we meet Abraham Lincoln. You know he’s going to be president. I know he’s going to be president. But Cage Weatherby doesn’t know it. He only knows that the tall young man that he meets in the midst of a fierce fight in the Black Hawk War is not your typical frontier lawyer and somebody worth watching.

Stephen Harrigan, (who made the Heartlands list in 2023 with his monumental history of Texas, big wonderful thing), has created in Weatherby the perfect fictional companion to the man whose unique formation has taken on mythic qualities. With Weatherby, a young poet, Abe can discuss history, literature, and politics while at the same time revealing his crippling depressive episodes and his total ineptitude in personal relationships.

Abe himself turns out to be a delightful character to hang out with. His humor and quirks are as delightful on the page as they must have been in real life. And Harrigan lets him breathe with all of his flaws intact, especially as he defends a black woman who has made her way from slavery to Illinois and is faced with being returned under the Fugitive Slave Act. That small victory stands side by side with other racial compromises that strain the friendship.

Harrigan is an engaging writer who has effectively recreated a period of American history that gets too little attention. And he returns to the Best Reads list at #3 in 2025.

Previously in this series:

#4 – Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

#5 – We Burn Daylight by Bret Anthony Johnston

#6 – Erasure by Percival Everett

#7 – Middlemarch by George Eliot

#8 – Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

#9 – By the Word Worked by Fleming Rutledge

#10 – Longitude by Dava Sobel