The Great Alone
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4.5 • 457 Ratings
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
Alaska, 1974. Untamed. Unpredictable. A story of a family in crisis struggling to survive at the edge of the world, it is also a story of young and enduring love.
Cora Allbright and her husband Ernt, a recently-returned Vietnam veteran scarred by the war, uproot their thirteen year old daughter Leni to start a new life in Alaska. Utterly unprepared for the weather and the isolation, but welcomed by the close-knit community, they fight to build a home in this harsh, beautiful wilderness.
At once an epic story of human survival and love, and an intimate portrait of a family tested beyond endurance, The Great Alone offers a glimpse into a vanishing way of life in America. With her trademark combination of elegant prose and deeply drawn characters, Kristin Hannah has delivered an enormously powerful story that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the remarkable and enduring strength of women.
About the highest stakes a family can face and the bonds that can tear a community apart, this is a novel as spectacular and powerful as Alaska itself. It is the finest example of Kristin Hannah’s ability to weave together the deeply personal with the universal.
'I didn't just love this book, I became obsessed with it . . . Hannah has delivered a masterclass in all the different ways love can both save us and destroy us.' - Sunday Times top ten bestselling author Karen Swan
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Set in Alaska in the 1970s, Kristin Hannah’s The Great Alone is a riveting, suspenseful story about teenager Leni, whose troubled Vietnam-vet father decides to start over as a homesteader. Speaking to us about her books, Hannah—the bestselling author of The Nightingale—said her top priority is creating characters who feel absolutely real. As Leni and her mother’s existence becomes more and more perilous, we become increasingly invested in their well-being. With its vivid natural settings and wonderful depictions of a resilient, isolated community, Hannah’s novel is an immersive adventure.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hannah's vivid depiction of a struggling family begins as a young father and POW returns from Vietnam, suffering from PTSD. The Allbright family, barely making ends meet in 1974, moves from Seattle to the untamed wilderness of Kaneq, Alaska, to claim a parcel of land left to Ernt by a slain Army buddy. Together with his wife, Cora, who spurned her middle-class parents to marry him, and their 13-year-old daughter, Leni, who barely remembers the adoring dad who's become so restless, Ernt is totally unprepared for the rigors of the family's new home. Soon, his fragile mental health and his relentless abuse of Cora worsen during the long nights of the family's first winter up north, even as the quirky and steely homesteaders around the Allbrights rally to help them. They intervene by forcing Ernt to leave in the winter to work on the newly started oil pipeline, but the added income and absences from Kaneq fail to fix his intractable paranoia and anger. Meanwhile, Leni finds friendship and love in a neighbor boy, Matthew, who is also a troubled survivor of a shattered family. Hannah skillfully situates the emotional family saga in the events and culture of the late '70s gas shortages, Watergate, Ted Bundy, Patty Hearst, and so on. But it's her tautly drawn characters Large Marge, Genny, Mad Earl, Tica, Tom who contribute not only to Leni's improbable survival but to her salvation amid her family's tragedy.
Customer Reviews
Brilliant and emotional
A wonderful book, well written and an emotional roller coaster with tragedy and deep happiness. Thoroughly recommended!
Excellent
Heartbreaking, beautiful and characters that feel so real I won’t forget them.
The Great Alone
Loved this book, the story, the characters, couldn’t put it down. This book got me into reading again.