# The Great Wide Open

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/douglas-kennedy/the-great-wide-open/9780099585213

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![The Great Wide Open](https://quivercdn.com/covers/arrow/douglas-kennedy/the-great-wide-open_978-00-9958-521-3.jpg?v=2026-04-22%2017%3A51%3A39)

- Book: [The Great Wide Open](https://www.bookquiver.com/douglas-kennedy/the-great-wide-open) ([The Great Wide Open.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/douglas-kennedy/the-great-wide-open.md))
- Authors: [Douglas Kennedy](https://www.bookquiver.com/douglas-kennedy)
- Publisher: arrow
- ISBN: 978-00-9958-521-3
- Pages: 592
- Published: 2019-07-25
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Softcover

## Description

‘Accomplished…a strangely mesmerising effect…absolutely excellent’ New Statesman New York, 1980s Alice Burns – a young book editor – is deep into a manuscript about the morass of family life. The observations within resonate, perhaps, because she has just watched her own family implode. As she reads she wonders: When did the sadness start? And could it be that unhappiness is a choice? Thus begins a great American epic which follows Alice as she navigates high school, first love and sexism at an elite college, a spell in 1970s Ireland, and a tragedy that sends her stateside as the US embraces a cowboy actor named Reagan. But it is also the tale of her endlessly complex parents and brothers – how their destinies are written by the lies they tell themselves and others. The Great Wide Open is an immensely ambitious and compulsive saga; a novel which will speak volumes to anyone who has marvelled at that pain that can only be caused by family itself.