Patti Callahan Henry will be interviewing Kristin Hannah.
In the wake of her phenomenal, internationally bestselling book,
The Nightingale, Kristin Hannah delivers a new novel – another daring, beautiful, stay-up-all-night story about love, loss, and the fight for survival. As with The Nightingale, (published in 43 languages, and currently in movie production at TriStar Pictures
with Michelle Maclaren set to direct), The Great Alone (February 2018 | St. Martin’s Press | $28.99 | Hardcover | 978-0- 312-57723-0) is another deeply moving and relevant portrait of the power and strength of women. The Great Alone – set in the iconic American location of Alaska, a place of incomparable
beauty and danger – “is a tour de force . . . a Romeo and Juliet- like coming of age story and domestic potboiler, recreating in magical detail the lives of Alaska’s homesteaders . . . as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-
Vietnam America.” (Kirkus starred review).
For 13-year-old Leni Allbright, Alaska is the place that both saves her family and destroys the innocence of her childhood. It is 1974. The world is deeply divided. Gone is the idealism and innocence of previous generations. Leni’s father, Ernt, has come home from his years as a POW in Vietnam a changed, volatile man. He decides impulsively to move his family north to Alaska, where they will live off the grid, in a desperate bid to find peace, restoration, freedom. But when the darkness of winter falls, his undiagnosed PTSD puts them all at risk, and Leni and her mother, Cora, learn the dangers of isolation and paranoia. Out in the wild, there is no one to save them except themselves.
Like Kristin Hannah’s international bestselling novel, The Nightingale, which illuminated the breathtaking courage of the women of the French Resistance in World War II France, The Great Alone focuses on fiercely independent women in extraordinarily difficult circumstances who must fight each day to survive. The Great Alone dares to show us what strong, determined women can accomplish. Hannah’s themes of survival, female empowerment, domestic abuse, undiagnosed PTSD, the cost of the Vietnam War, and the echoes of the l970’s today, are all at the forefront of the conversation in this country. The Great Alone is a celebration and an exquisite study of human frailty and resilience, and a warning that wildness lives in both nature and man.