A Jewish immigrant, a Cherokee woman, and a black slave find love, friendship, and redemption in the midst of the tragedy of the Trail of Tears

Abrahan Bento Sassaporta Naggar has traveled to America from the filthy, Jew-hating streets of East London in search of a better life. But Abe's visions of a privileged apprenticeship in the Sassaporta Brothers' empire based in Savannah, Georgia, are soon replaced with the grim reality of indentured servitude in his uncle Isadore's camp town near Greensborough, North Carolina.

Some 50 miles west, a woman named Dark Water of the Mountains leads a life of irreverent solitude. The daughter of a powerful Cherokee chief, it has been nearly 20 years since she renounced her family's plans for her to marry a wealthy white man.

Far away in Georgia, a black slave named Jacob has resigned himself to a life of loss and injustice in a city of refuge for criminals.

A trio of outsiders linked by unrequited and rekindled love, Abe, Dark Water, and Jacob find themselves surrounded by the escalating horrors of President Jackson's Indian Removal Act. As the US government implements the appalling logistics of transporting the Native American tribes of the South to the western side of the Mississippi River, Abe tries desperately to intervene—and Jacob and Dark Water fight for their lives.