1865. The American Civil War is ending. Eighteen years after the famine shipStar of the Seadocked at New York, the daughter of two of her passengers sets out from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on a walk across a devastated America. Eliza Duane Mooney is searching for her younger brother she has not seen in four years, one of the hundred thousand children drawn into the war. His fate has been mysterious and will prove extraordinary.

It's a walk that will have consequences for many seemingly unconnected survivors: a love-struck cartographer, a haunted Latina poetess, rebel guerrilla Cole McLaurenson, runaway slave Elizabeth Longstreet and the mercurial revolutionary James Con O'Keeffe, who commanded a brigade of Irish immigrants in the Union Army and is now Governor of a western wilderness where nothing is as it seems.

Joseph O'Connor was born in Dublin. His novels includeCowboys and Indians(Whitbread Prize shortlist),Star of the Sea(Irish PostAward for Fiction, France's Prix Millepages, Prix Madeleine Zepter for European Novel of the Year),Redemption Falls,andGhost Light(Dublin One City One Book Novel, 2011). In 2012 he won the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Achievement in Literature. His work has been published in thirty-five languages.

www.josephoconnorauthor.com