Emma Hardwick is working late in her attic studio when her wealthy, oil-executive father announces that their family must immediately abandon their remote mountain estate in the middle of a bleak, Alaskan winter night, leaving their phones to prevent tracking and telling no one about their departure.
With her mother and rebellious younger sisters, they head north from Anchorage toward a shadowy possibility of safety. In the woods of the former Denali National Park, now under eco-assault for its prized natural resources, incriminating questions arise about her father’s culpability in the “wildfire killings” and his hidden links to Alaska’s attempted break from the United States. As Emma questions what she owes him, she dreads his discovery of her role in his prosecution by the U.S. Department of Justice and the agonizing choice that she felt forced to make.
Disaster strikes in the early dawn when both her parents are killed. On their own, Emma and her sisters escape through the forbidding, tundra wilderness, fighting with each other about their desperate strategies to survive in the former Denali paradise, now ravaged by wildcat oil encampments and paramilitary forces. A hidden community of subsistence settlers and a new boom town that has arisen in the wilderness draw the sisters as possible havens. Determined to escape the menacing forces who seek her father’s incriminating data files, Emma must confront the terrible risk of losing everything she loves if she wants to keep any part of it.
In Alaska, Patricia researched the settings of Not Her Father’s Daughter and interviewed survival experts, Native Alaskans, and local residents. She has worked in partnership with her sculptor husband on private commissions and large public-artworks in the U.S. and Japan. She has lived in Minneapolis, Malibu, Copenhagen, Italy, New York,
In Alaska, Patricia researched the settings of Not Her Father’s Daughter and interviewed survival experts, Native Alaskans, and local residents. She has worked in partnership with her sculptor husband on private commissions and large public-artworks in the U.S. and Japan. She has lived in Minneapolis, Malibu, Copenhagen, Italy, New York, and French Polynesia. Currently she lives with her husband in the mountains of Southern California in their hand-built, high-desert home, surrounded by trees and twenty acres of sagebrush.
Columbia University: M.A. in English and Comparative Literature. Javits Fellowship. Finalist for Nicholls Screenwriting Fellowship.
UCLA: Collier Novel Prize. B.A. in English and Creative Writing. High Honors, Phi Beta Kappa. Chancellor’s Fellowship.
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