In the middle of the last century, Lidie Newton and her abolitionist husband join the pioneering westward migration into America's heartland. To Lidie, 'Kansas seems like a new place entirely. We can't tell if anything we already know is true.' The truth proves harsher than any of the would-be homesteaders around her could have imagined. Lidie, her family and her friends, find themselves on a faultline as two great American forces rumble and crash against each other, soon to erupt into the bloodiest war the world has yet seen - the American Civil War.