The Great Alone

by Kristin Hannah

He taught her something new about friendship: it picked right back up where you’d left off, as if you hadn’t been apart at all.

But was she supposed to be trapped forever by her mother’s choice and her father’s rage?

SUCH A THIN VEIL separated the past from the present; they existed simultaneously in the human heart. Anything could transport you—the smell of the sea at low tide, the screech of a gull, the turquoise of a glacier-fed river. A voice in the wind could be both true and imagined.

Grief this deep was a silent, lonely thing.

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. Not who you dream of being, not who you imagined you were, not who you were raised to be. All of that will be torn away in the months of icy darkness, when frost on the windows blurs your view and the world gets very small and you stumble into the truth of your existence. You learn what you will do to survive.