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THE STORY
The war was ending. Their war was just beginning.
Before the Civil War draws its final breath, Captain Alden Zur deserts the Union Army and leads his family west into a brutal land where survival demands everything, and mercy can cost your life.
What Zur finds in the high country of Colorado is no promised land. It is a territory at the edge of the map and the edge of conscience — populated by deserters, outlaws, settlers, and the wreckage of a country still tearing itself apart. Here, loyalty is a weapon. Honor is a wound. And the only law is what a man can defend at the end of a long night.
Blueland is a sweeping, intimate novel about a family forced to forge themselves anew — and about the brutal, beautiful country that demands the price.
THE WORLD OF BLUELAND
Four wildernesses, One frontier
War's Exhausted End
A Union army held together by ghosts, and a captain who can no longer carry them.
Family Survival
A wife, children, and the unspoken pact that binds them to the trail.
Colorado Wilderness
Colorado: thin air, thinner law, country that does not negotiate.
Loyalty & Brutality
Loyalty, vengeance, and the long arithmetic of what a man owes his blood.
THE STORYTELLER
An early excerpt
The captain unbuckled his saber and laid it across the saddle without ceremony. He had carried it through Antietam, through the cold mud of Fredericksburg, through the long bright slaughter of Gettysburg, and he had not, in any of those places, found a thing it was good for. He looked once at the column moving east, once at his wife on the wagon seat, and a third time at nothing at all, which was the way west.
"Are we leaving the army, papa?" the boy asked.
"We are leaving everything, son."
The country in front of them did not yet have a name on his maps. The men who would soon name it had not yet bled enough to earn the right.
FROM THE READERS
Pre-Publication Praise
"In Blueland, the shadow of American Civil War stretches far beyond surrender. This is not a tale of reconciliation but of reckoning. Alden Zur is a protagonist forged in violence, and the frontier he rides into is as morally torn as the nation he leaves behind. Stark, unflinching, and utterly absorbing."
EARLY READER
"Brutal and intimate in equal measure, Blueland explores what happens when war-trained men try to plant roots in unsettled soil. Loyalty shifts like sand, mercy proves dangerous, and every acre is earned with blood. This novel lingers long after the final page."
EARLY READER
"With prose as severe and beautiful as a Colorado winter, Blueland reimagines the myth of westward expansion. It strips away nostalgia and replaces it with hunger, betrayal, and hard choices. The result is a powerful meditation on survival and the cost of building something that lasts."
EARLY READER
"A haunting portrait of a family shaped by violence and bound by necessity, Blueland captures the uneasy birth of a new life in Colorado's untamed expanse. It asks whether civilization is merely savagery with fences — and whether freedom is worth the price demanded."
EARLY READER
A NOTE FROM THE ARTHUR
"Blueland is the book I have been circling my entire writing life. It is about the country we became after the war, and the country we still are."
ROBERT JAXX
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