Kristin Hannah has been a popular author for many years, but established herself as an author of more serious novels with her 2015 novel, The Nightingale, a story of two sisters in Nazi occupied France. Her latest novel, The Great Alone, follows a family of three trying to make it in rural Alaska. Leni's father is a veteran and former POW from the Vietnam War. When they move to Alaska, Leni and her mother struggle to deal with his violent outbursts and paranoia. They come to rely on the few people in town they can trust to help them. It is a beautiful, haunting, hard to put down novel. If you loved The Great Alone, or you're waiting for a copy to read, you'll probably like one of the following books as well.

WHAT TO READ NEXT:

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Educated by Tara Westover In her memoir, Westover recounts her childhood growing up in a strict Mormon family, ruled by an erratic father, and living off the grid in Idaho. Westover compellingly sketches her years growing up, her relationships with siblings, encounters in the town nearby, and the events that eventually drove her to leave and pursue formal education.

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The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver The family of a fierce evangelical Baptist missionary--Nathan Price, his wife, and his four daughters--begins to unravel after they embark on a 1959 mission to the Belgian Congo, where they find their lives forever transformed over the course of three decades by the political and social upheaval of Africa.

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Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller Peggy Hillcoat is eight years old when her survivalist father, James, takes her from their home in London to a remote hut in the woods and tells her that the rest of the world has been destroyed. Deep in the wilderness, Peggy and James make a life for themselves. They repair the hut, bathe in water from the river, hunt and gather food in the summers and almost starve in the harsh winters. They mark their days only by the sun and the seasons.

When Peggy finds a pair of boots in the forest and begins a search for their owner, she unwittingly begins to unravel the series of events that brought her to the woods and, in doing so, discovers the strength she needs to go back to the home and mother she thought she’d lost.

After Peggy's return to civilization, her mother learns the truth of her escape, of what happened to James on the last night out in the woods, and of the secret that Peggy has carried with her ever since. 

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Pilgrim's Wilderness by Tom Kizzia When Papa Pilgrim appeared in the Alaska frontier outpost of McCarthy with his wife and fifteen children in tow, his new neighbors had little idea of the trouble to come. The Pilgrim Family presented themselves as a shining example of the homespun Christian ideal, with their proud piety and beautiful old-timey music, but their true story ran dark and deep. Within weeks, Papa had bulldozed a road through the mountains to the new family home at an abandoned copper mine, sparking a tense confrontation with the National Park Service and forcing his ghost town neighbors to take sides in an ever-more volatile battle over where a citizen’s rights end and the government’s power begins.