Just across the sound

the long version

"In 1860, amid rumblings of war, Sarah Eliza Mott, a teacher and only sister to five younger brothers, returns home to Norfolk, Virginia, and finds ample fuel for her radical ideas about the abolition of slavery. Then, as she accompanies her father to Roanoke Island, North Carolina, she finds not only a kindred spirit in Lewis Sheldon Mann, a planter and mailboat captain, but an awakened sense of love. There's no time for their relationship to mature and war intervenes. Two of her brothers join the Union cause and find themselves in harm's way, and Lewis embarks on a dangerous mission to guide the Yankee invaders as they storm ashore near his Roanoke Island home. But, ultimately, distance and tragedy fail to keep the lovers apart. Just across the sound is a true story of three cities and the effect the Civil War had upon the lives of two families--separating them, yet binding them together."--Jacket.