Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of Star of the Sea and Shadowplay, a novel of epic power, ferocious grit, indomitable resolve, and shattering romance, set in a savage and lawless Western Territory in the aftermath of the Civil War. 1865—the Civil War is ending. Eighteen years after the Irish famine-ship Star of the Sea docked at New York, a daughter of its journey, Eliza Duane Mooney, sets out on foot from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, crossing a ravaged continent on a quest. Eliza is searching for a young boy 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 is a walk that will have consequences for many seemingly unconnected survivors: the stunning intellectual Lucia-Cruz McLelland, who deserts New York City to cast her fate with mercurial hero James Con O'Keeffe—convict, revolutionary, and commander of a brigade of Irish immigrants in the Union Army turned governor of the desolate Western township of Redemption Falls; rebel guerilla Cole McLaurenson, who fuels his own gruesome Westward mission with the blind rage of an outlaw; and runaway slave Elizabeth Longstreet, who turns resentment into grace in a Western wilderness where nothing is as it seems. Redemption Falls is a Dickensian tale of war and forgiveness, of strangers in a strange land, of love put to the ultimate test. Packed with music, poetry, and storytelling, this is "a vivid mosaic of a vast country driven wild by war" (Irish Independent) and a riveting tale of urgent contemporary resonance.