Summer, 1847. People are getting used to the corpses lying by the road and along the ditches. For John Mitchel – lawyer, journalist, activist, politician – the word ‘famine’ will forever conjure the hollowed faces of Ireland’s dead, the liquid Irish of the past now mute on their tongues. Propelled by disgust at the injustice, Mitchel will do all he can to fight for the destitute, the starved, the forgotten. His odyssey will take him all the way to America – that land of promise – but it will draw him into a terrible paradox, blurring the lines that divide liberation from dispossession and forcing him to ask: can one act of devastating cruelty and oppression prevent another?