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The number one New York Times best seller
The newest audiobook sensation from Kristin Hannah, best-selling author of The Nightingale.
This program is read by acclaimed narrator Julia Whelan, whose enchanting voice brought Gone Girl and Fates and Furies to life. Kristin Hannah reads the acknowledgements.
Alaska, 1974. Unpredictable. Unforgiving. Untamed.
For a family in crisis, the ultimate test of survival.
Ernt Allbright, a former POW, comes home from the Vietnam war a changed and volatile man. When he loses yet another job, he makes an impulsive decision: He will move his family north, to Alaska, where they will live off the grid in America’s last true frontier. Thirteen-year-old Leni, a girl coming of age in a tumultuous time, caught in the riptide of her parents’ passionate, stormy relationship, dares to hope that a new land will lead to a better future for her family. She is desperate for a place to belong. Her mother, Cora, will do anything and go anywhere for the man she loves, even if means following him into the unknown.
At first, Alaska seems to be the answer to their prayers. In a wild, remote corner of the state, they find a fiercely independent community of strong men and even stronger women. The long, sunlit days and the generosity of the locals make up for the Allbrights’ lack of preparation and dwindling resources. But as winter approaches and darkness descends on Alaska, Ernt’s fragile mental state deteriorates and the family begins to fracture. Soon the perils outside pale in comparison to threats from within. In their small cabin, covered in snow, blanketed in 18 hours of night, Leni and her mother learn the terrible truth: They are on their own. In the wild, there is no one to save them but themselves.
In this unforgettable portrait of human frailty and resilience, Kristin Hannah reveals the indomitable character of the modern American pioneer and the spirit of a vanishing Alaska – a place of incomparable beauty and danger.
The Great Alone is a daring, beautiful, stay-up-all-night audiobook about love and loss, the fight for survival, and the wildness that lives in both man and nature.
Praise for The Great Alone:
“Listeners, beware: You won’t want to stop listening to narrator Julia Whelan’s performance of this complex story of survival and family…. With pitch-perfect timing and a touch of drama, Whelan exquisitely builds the tension, creating an enveloping atmosphere of foreboding that’s difficult to turn away from…a don’t miss audiobook experience.” (AudioFile Magazine)
“Reliably alluring…The Great Alone is packed with rapturous descriptions of Alaskan scenery…. Hannah remembers and summons an undeveloped wilderness, describing a gloriously pristine region in the days before cruise ships discovered it.” (The New York Times Daily Review)
“Kristin Hannah’s new novel makes Alaska sound equally gorgeous and treacherous – a glistening realm that lures folks into the wild and then kills them there.” (The Washington Post)
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Jordan Casper –
It is beautiful story written beautifully. I love it. Leni and Cora both were the fighters. I admire them both. Looking forward to visiting Alaska very soon.
Caron –
I loved this book!
Charlie –
The book is well written and the author manages to make us imagine and even visualize the expanse of the Alaskan landscape. Also, the protagonist and her father are well defined characters. With Cora, though, the writer fails to give us a true character: she is flat, pathetic, with no backbone. A victim of the worst kind. The plot, too, is not particularly interesting. Something could have been improved.
S. Smith –
On the first page, 13-year-old Leni wakes to the sound of her parents arguing. Again. The weather in Washington State is dark and threatening—and it turns her father dark and threatening, too. Ernt survived a Vietnamese POW camp and has the physical and psychological scars to prove it. Life with and for Ernt is hard. He can’t keep a job, so the family gets by on Cora’s waitress salary. Leni has gone to five schools in four years. She is the perpetual new girl, the one without friends or nice clothes. She escapes into books and feels she is the only adult in her family.
The larger scene is just as dreary: a nation divided by Vietnam, bombings by radical groups, hijacked planes, the Patty Hearst kidnapping, the Munich Olympics massacre, and Watergate. When Ernt gets a letter from the father of his Army buddy who didn’t make it home, he learns his friend has left him his cabin in Alaska. Without a job or much thought, he moves his family there for a better life.
The cabin is isolated and barely habitable, and with winter coming on, the family is totally unprepared for the realities of life in Alaska. Still, with the help of long-time Alaskan transplants, the family begins to make a place for themselves.
But Ernt’s problems have followed him. As winter arrives, the long, dark days take a toll on Ernt’s mental health, and Leni finds herself in the adult position again, and this time she’s really scared.
The Great Alone is the ugly story of the twisted love and jealousy that fuels an abusive marriage and fails to protect Leni. But it’s also a love letter to Alaska in all its beautiful wildness and to the resilient, modern-day pioneers who left everything behind to create a new life for themselves. The writing is fluid, and the characters are believable.
Amazon Customer –
The story gripped you & dragged you in so you almost felt you were there. The language Kristin used was so descriptive it made everything tangible. A truly wonderful read.
BC –
I was captivated from this novel from the beginning. So many factors are involved: Broken people with broken souls; family abuse; a sad portrait of a woman who tolerates abuse; the effects of abuse on a child; the tragedy of a Viet Nam Vet’s post-war mental breakdown of his once good soul. For me, however, the most poignant and educational factors were the descriptions of a wild, desolate, beautiful Alaska in the 1970’s. And the stories behind the characters involved who lived there – and played vital roles to the main characters. The tension is palpable. The story is mesmerizing, soulful, heartbreaking, suspenseful. It’s one of those rare novels that had me breaking my rule of reading only at bedtime…I had to find out ‘what’s happening next?”.
If the following passages do not whet the appetite, I don’t know what will:
“Two kinds of folks come up to Alaska, Cora. People running to something and people running away from something. The second kind-you want to keep your eye out for them. And it isn’t just the people you need to watch out for, either. Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.”
“Even her laugh seemed at home here, an echo of the bells that tinkled from wind chimes in front of the shops.”
“Leni stared down at the sea, rolling inexorably toward her. Nothing you did could hold back that rising tide. One mistake or miscalculation and you could be stranded or washed away. All you could do was protect yourself by reading the charts and being prepared and making smart choices.”
“She was sweating hard, scooping a bucket of water from the creek, slopping it across her boots, when night fell. And she meant FELL; it hit hard and fast, like a lid clanging down on its pot.”
“Dad’s intentions were good, but even so, it was like living with a wild animal. Like those crazy hippies the Alaskans talked about who lived with wolves and bears and invariably ended up getting killed. The natural-born predator could seem domesticated, even friendly, could lick your throat affectionately or rub up against you to get a back scratch. But you knew, or should know, that it was a wild thing you lived with, that a collar and leash and a bowl of food might tame the actions of the beast, but couldn’t change its essential nature. In a split second,, less time than it took to exhale a breath, that wolf could claim its nature and turn, fangs bared.”
“A girl was like a kite; without her mother’s strong, steady hold on the string, she might just flat away, be lost somewhere among the clouds.”
“Fear and shame she understood. Fear made you run and hide and shame made you stay quiet, but this anger wanted something else. Release.”
“There it was: the sad truth. Mama loved him too much to leave him. Still, even now, with her face bruised and swollen. Maybe what she’d always said was true, maybe she couldn’t breathe without him, maybe she’d wilt like a flower without the sunshine of his adoration.”
“Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you. No one cared if you had an old car on your deck, let alone a rusted fridge. Any life that could be imagined could be lived up here.”
“It made Leni feel as if she were a coil of rope drawn around a cleat with the wind pulling at it, tugging, the rope creaking in resistance, slipping. If the line wasn’t perfectly tied down, it would all come undone, be torn away, maybe the wind would pull the cleat from its home in fury.”
“There were a lot of bumper stickers like that out here, deep in Alaska’s wild interior, far from the tourist destinations of the coast or the majestic beauty of Denali. Alaska was full of fringe-ists. People who believed in weirdo things and prayed to exclusionary Gods and filled their basements with equal measures of guns and Bibles. If you wanted to live in a place where no one told you what to do and didn’t care if you parked a trailer in your yard or had a fridge on your porch, Alaska was the state for you.”
“The farther away you got from civilization, the stranger things got. Most people spent one dark, bleak, eight-month winter in Fairbanks and left the state screaming. The few who stayed-misfits, adventurers, romantics, loners-rarely left again.”
“Sometimes you had to go backward in order to go forward.”
“He hadn’t realized how time could unspool the years of your life until for a second you were fourteen again, crying from a place so deep it seemed to predate you, desperate to be whole again.”
“Time was not something she usually paid much attention to. On the homestead, the bigger picture mattered-the darkening of the sky, the ebbing of the tide, the snow hares changing color, the birds returning or flying south. That was how they marked the passage of time, in growing seasons and salmon runs, and the first snowfall.”
“After that and all the way home, he said nothing, which should have been better than yelling, but it wasn’t. Yelling was like a bomb in the corner: you saw it, watched the fuse burn, and you knew when it would explode and you needed to run for cover. Not speaking was a killer somewhere in your house with a gun when you were sleeping.”
“Love and fear. The most destructive forces on earth. Fear had turned her inside out, love had made her stupid.”
“Five out of every thousand people went missing in Alaska every year, were lost. That was a known fact. They fell down crevasses, lost their way on trails, drowned in a rising tide. Alaska. The Great Alone.”
“Someone said to me once that Alaska didn’t create character; it revealed it.”
“This state, this place, is like no other. It is beauty and horror; savior and destroyer. Here, where survival is a choice that must be made over and over, in the wildest place in America, on the edge of civilization, where water in all its forms can kill you, you learn who you are……..You learn what you will do to survive. That lesson, that revelation, as my mother once told me about love, is Alaska’s great and terrible gift. Those who come for beauty alone, or for some imaginary life, or those who seek safety, will fail. In the vast expanse of this unpredictable wilderness, you will either become your best self and flourish, or you will run away, screaming, from the dark and the cold and the hardship. There is no middle ground, no safe place; not here, in the Great Alone.”
The physical descriptions throughout the novel are ethereal…you can touch and feel and see what the author paints for you.
I think the author did an exquisite job with this novel – my one-time journey through Alaska will never be forgotten.
Jan Abell –
The Great Alone is another beautifully written story by Kristin Hannah. She describes Alaska in a way that the reader can picture its beauty, as well as the challenges of living there. The characters are interesting and the “hard to read” topics are thoughtfully written.
Jordan Casper –
I have just received my book and it either wasn’t in sufficient packaging to protect it or it is not new. I haven’t read the book yet.