The Great Alone
Kristin Hannah (2018)
“A family follows a broken man to the Alaskan wilderness — and discovers that the greatest danger is not the land, it is the one who brought them there.”
At a Glance
In 1974, thirteen-year-old Leni Allbright moves with her parents to a remote homestead in Alaska after her volatile father Ernt receives land from a deceased Vietnam War buddy. Isolated by brutal winters and cut off from help, Leni falls in love with the son of her father’s enemy, while her mother Cora remains trapped in a cycle of abuse that the wilderness only intensifies. What begins as a survivalist adventure becomes a story about what it costs to love someone you cannot save.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
The Great Alone debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list and remained on it for months. It reached a general audience rarely touched by literary fiction exploring domestic violence, introducing millions of readers to a subject usually confined to smaller-press literary novels. Its publishing success enabled a serious treatment of PTSD, survivalism, and abuse in a commercially dominant novel.
Diction Profile
Accessible literary prose with elevated landscape writing — emotionally direct, sensory, avoiding both sentimentality and clinical detachment
Moderate