Eighteen years after the famine ship Star of the Sea docked at New York, the daughter of two of her passengers sets out from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to walk across a devastated America in search of her younger brother: one of the child soldiers involved in the recent civil war. But it is a walk that will have consequences for many seemingly unconnected survivors: a love-struck cartographer, a haunted Latin poetess, a rebel guerrilla, a runaway slave, a mute boy, and 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.