"Life burns hot," fifteen-year-old Fergus O'Brien's mother tells him late in the summer of 1846. Before the end of this fateful year, young Fergus will witness his family and house collapsing in flames and be thrust on a journey through the Great Famine in Ireland to the teeming wharves of Liverpool and the brutal railyards of Wales, and finally on a crossing to a new life in Quebec and "the Boston states". In his passage from innocence to experience, Fergus quickly learns "The law of dreams is, keep moving."