And (the era) allowed me to bring in the popular culture I was experiencing, the books I was reading, the clothes I was wearing.” “And it just seems like we are there again. “I realized what a dangerous time it must have felt like if you were an adult,” Hannah says. She was living in Seattle then, with serial killer Ted Bundy in the news and protests against the Vietnam War or for women’s rights still current.

The story opens in 1974, when Hannah was about the same age as Leni, just one of several pieces of her own history that flowed into the story she wrote. “And I realized that the ’70s felt kind of relevant again, the social unrest, the political uncertainty. “About two years ago, we were in sort of the middle of the political process in the United States,” Hannah says. Current real-world events also influenced the new direction her writing took. What she loved most about that nearly complete novel was the setting of Alaska and the off-the-grid characters she’d populated it with. “I was trying to decide do I throw this away? Do I start over? What do I do?” The thriller seemed a good idea for a follow-up to “The Nightingale,” a best-seller throughout 2015 after its release, but 18 months into the project something didn’t feel right, she says. “It ultimately just didn’t coalesce into a story that I wanted to tell, that I was comfortable with,” Hannah says.

“I had just come off the sort of mind-boggling success of ‘The Nightingale,’ and I guess I was … I don’t know, it sort of messed with my head a little bit.” “What happened was I set out originally to write a kind of a domestic thriller set in modern-day Alaska,” Hannah says from her son’s home in Studio City where she was hanging out with her two small grandchildren recently. Kristin Hannah has written a lot of books, though it’s nothing she spends time considering. “This is 20-something,” she says of “The Great Alone,” her latest, “although I haven’t actually counted them in a while.”īut “The Great Alone,” a page-turner set in the wilds of Alaska that celebrates female empowerment in exploring a theme of domestic violence, is sure to stand out for Hannah, no matter how many more she writes, given the difficult birth of this book, she says.

Books like the great alone