Product Overview
From Follett
Includes bibliographical references (pages 453-455). "Born a slave, Bledsoe had never left Our Joy plantation, and a daring escape offers his only chance for liberty. On the run he encounters Alice, an Irish indentured servant committing what appears to be an act of murder as she burns down a shack in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. Faced with the threat of capture, Bledsoe and Alice become reluctant allies. An epic tale unfolds as their quest for freedom pulls them from swamp to city, from North Carolina to Virginia. Somewhere between injustice and loss, they discover a hidden place that seems like an Eden, where their bond and love are forged. But the Confederate army is on the march and soon tramples their tenuous freedom. Separated, they are cast into fates they never imagined. Through it all, the hope of deliverance drives them onward, and the memory of their Edenland remains, burning bright against the darkness of slavery and the American Civil War."--Page 4 of cover.
From the Publisher
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.