Blackstone Publishing has acquired Atz Kilcher’s memoir about growing up with a hard father in a hard land. SON OF A MIDNIGHT LAND offers readers a realistic look at the emotional price this eldest of eight children paid for his father’s dream to homestead in Alaska’s remote wilderness.

Known to many as the patriarch of Discovery Channel’s Emmy-shortlisted program Alaska: The Last Frontier, Kilcher is also an artist, a writer, a musician, and the man who taught his daughter Jewel how to sing and perform.

Kilcher’s tough upbringing in the Alaskan frontier is described vividly in this memoir. His mother, a cultured Swiss woman, struggled to adapt to the family’s new way of life, far from civilization, while his father was determined to make their new life work. Atz (prounounced AHHTZ) reflects on the survival skills he took on because of this upbringing—some that served him well and others from which he later had to learn to free himself in order to become a better man and a good father to his own children.

Throughout the memoir, Kilcher’s message conveys an important revelation the junior Kilcher has come to in his later years: that his father’s harsh manner was essentially fallout from his own fear of failure; relational intimacy was a luxury he simply didn’t have time for. Letting his father off the hook sets Kilcher free to optimistically cultivate the good things—and the good land—his father worked so hard to create.

We couldn’t be happier about placing Atz’s book with Blackstone, who is making it one of their first non-fiction releases from their new print line, set to release simultaneously alongside the audio version read by the author, a natural oral storyteller.

Atz Kilcher is represented by Sandra Bishop. Contact: sandra@transatlanticagency.com

Share: