The Great Alone
Kristin Hannah, 2018
Historical fiction RomanceContemporary fiction
A girl, her fragile mother and a Vietnam-scarred father inherit forty acres of Alaska — a story about how far love will drive a family. A plain, tender voice carries you through family tension and Alaskan harshness, with dread humming under the slower stretches.
Feels like dread and tenderness. About family and home.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you gravitate toward close family portraits set in hard landscapes and can sit with a story that turns tense. The father’s volatility and the book’s steady dread make some stretches bleak, so it may not suit you when you want lightness.
Why read it
It gives you an intimate look at a family trying to make a home in a place that does not soften them, and at a daughter learning her own strength.
A page from the book
The child who keeps the whole family from tipping over, and knows it.
Leni was afraid to stay and afraid to leave. It was strange—stupid, even—but she often felt like the only adult in her family, as if she were the ballast that kept the creaky Allbright boat on an even keel. Mama was engaged in a continual quest to “find” herself. In the past few years, she’d tried EST and the human potential movement, spiritual training, Unitarianism. Even Buddhism. She’d cycled through them all, cherry-picked pieces and bits. Mostly, Leni thought, Mama had come away with T-shirts and sayings. Things like, What is, is, and what isn’t, isn’t. None of it seemed to amount to much. Kristin Hannah.Hannah practised law before she became a novelist, and The Great Alone followed The Nightingale, her blockbuster about two sisters in occupied France.
Books that feel like this
More by Kristin Hannah
The Nightingale
Kristin Hannah, 2015
Two sisters in occupied France discover how ordinary choices can become courage, betrayal, and survival.
The Women
Kristin Hannah, 2024
A sheltered California girl becomes an Army nurse in Vietnam, and discovers a war that will not stay far away.
The Four Winds
Kristin Hannah, 2021
Texas, 1934: a woman nobody at home ever wanted walks out into the Dust Bowl and decides how much she is willing to endure.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is The Great Alone for me?
- You may like it if you gravitate toward close family portraits set in hard landscapes and can sit with a story that turns tense. The father’s volatility and the book’s steady dread make some stretches bleak, so it may not suit you when you want lightness.
- What is The Great Alone like?
- A plain, tender voice carries you through family tension and Alaskan harshness, with dread humming under the slower stretches. Feels like dread and tenderness. About family and home.
- What should I read after The Great Alone?
- If you liked The Great Alone, try Mad Honey (Jodi Picoult), Redeeming Love (Francine Rivers) and An American Marriage (Tayari Jones).
A taste of the feed
The vertigo of noticing, mid-breakfast, that your child is grown.
For a moment, I let myself stare at him. It’s hard to believe that the soft-centered little boy who would cry when his hands got sticky with propolis from the hives can now lift a super full of forty pounds of honey as if it weighs no more than his hockey stick. Asher is over six feet tall, but even as he was growing, he was never ungainly. He moves with the kind of grace you find in wildcats, the ones that can steal away a kitten or a chick before you even realize they’ve gone. Asher has my blond hair and the same ghost-green eyes, for which I have always been grateful.
Mad Honey · Jodi Picoult
The difference between being someone’s partner and someone’s god.
No, you won’t. And I won’t be enough for you, Amanda. I don’t want to be the center of your life. I want to be part of it. I want to be your husband, not your god. People can’t always be there for you, no matter how much they want to be. And that includes me.
Redeeming Love · Francine Rivers
What it costs to walk back into a house love has left.
Sometimes it’s exhausting for me to simply walk into the house. I try and calm myself, remember that I’ve lived alone before. Sleeping by myself didn’t kill me then and will not kill me now. But this what loss has taught me of love. Our house isn’t simply empty, our home has been emptied. Love makes a place in your life, it makes a place for itself in your bed. Invisibly, it makes a place in your body, rerouting all your blood vessels, throbbing right alongside your heart. When it’s gone, nothing is whole again.
An American Marriage · Tayari Jones
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