The Great Alone

The Great Alone is a novel by the American writer Kristin Hannah, published in 2018. It is set in Alaska in the 1970s and is told largely from the point of view of Leni Allbright.

Leni's father Ernt came back from the Vietnam War changed, and when he inherits land in Alaska he moves the family north to start again. Cora, Leni's mother, follows him the way she always has. The Allbrights land in a settlement of people who help each other because they have to, and they begin to learn the practical lessons of a country with a short growing season and a long, dark winter. Ernt's temper, which was dangerous in the city, becomes more dangerous in a cabin with no neighbours, and Leni grows up watching her mother weigh one kind of fear against another. The novel moves through the seasons of a place where weather decides what is possible, and Leni's account of her parents is also the record of a daughter learning to look after herself.

The Alaska of the book is a working country of homesteaders, fishermen and oil money rather than a holiday landscape, and the family's survival depends on the neighbours it learns to trust.