THE DEER CAMP: A Memoir of a Father, a Family, and the Land that Healed Them

Bloomsbury, May 14, 2019

Some families have to dig hard to find the love that holds them together. Some have to grow it out of the ground. THE DEER CAMP: A Memoir of a Father, a Family, and the Land that Healed Them is the true story of the author’s family and the power of nature.

Bruce Kuipers was good at hunting, fishing and working, but not at much else that makes a real father or husband. Conflicted, angry, and a serial cheater, he destroyed his relationship with his wife, Nancy, and alienated his three sons—journalist Dean, woodsman Brett, and troubled yet brilliant fisherman Joe. He distrusted people and clung to rural America as a place to hide.

So when Bruce purchased a 100-acre hunting property as a way to reconnect with his sons, they resisted. The land was the perfect bait, but none of them knew how to be together as a family. Conflicts arose over whether the land – an old farm that had been degraded and reduced to a few stands of pine and blowing sand – should be left alone or be actively restored. After a decade-long impasse, Bruce acquiesced, and his sons proceeded with their restoration plan. What happened next was a miracle of nature.

Dean Kuipers weaves a beautiful and surprising story about the restorative power of land and of his own family, which so desperately needed healing. Heartwarming and profound, THE DEER CAMP: A Memoir of a Father, a Family, and the Land that Healed Them is the perfect story of fathers, sons, and the beauty and magic of the natural world.

For interviews or press information, contact:
Tara Kennedy at Bloomsbury
tara.kennedy@bloomsbury.com
212.419.5310

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PRAISE FOR THE DEER CAMP

“The Deer Camp is an astonishing, impossible-to-put-down memoir that engages our largest conflicts—generational, psychological, global—with a rarified combination of rigor, grace, and levity. ‘The big problems can be solved only by small solutions,’ a friend tells author Dean Kuipers, and Kuipers’ radical, small solutions are sentences—one brutally true sentence after the next—that together accrue the breathing power of a wild landscape capable of reconciling, as only the land can, an estranged father and his sons. Luminous, vital, at times even hilarious, The Deer Camp is one of the most necessary books I’ve read in years.”
—Chris Dombrowski, author of BODY OF WATER 

In this poignant, honest memoir, Dean Kuipers guides readers through forests that feel both familiar and wild, in search of a family and a father he’d never known. The Deer Camp deftly navigates the deep and often complicated relationships between who we are and the places we love.
– Caroline Van Hemert, author of THE SUN IS A COMPASS