At the onset of the Civil War, eighteen-year-old Bledsoe, son of a slave and his white master, runs away from the plantation where he was born. Desperately lost in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina, he finds himself witness to a young Irishwoman in the act of what appears to be cold-blooded murder. Through no choice of his own, Bledsoe suddenly finds himself on the run with this strange, nearly feral child of the Dismal swamp. As the country is torn in two, Bledsoe and Alice find themselves united on a journey both tragic and darkly comic, in an epic saga of a country at war with itself and a love so fierce nothing can divide it.