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‘Daringly ambitious’: Maggie Shipstead

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead review – a soaring achievement

Charting the parallel lives of two women – one an aviation pioneer, the other a modern movie star – this daring novel reaches great heights

A great circle, Maggie Shipstead’s third novel explains on the opening page, is “the largest circle that can be drawn on a sphere”. The equator is one; so is every line of longitude. The novel’s heroine, pioneering aviator Marian Graves, was attempting to become the first person to fly a great circle intersecting both poles in 1950 when her plane disappeared somewhere in the Antarctic. Decades later, her enigmatic, fragmentary journal is discovered, wrapped in a life-preserver. “What I have done is foolish; I had no choice but to do it,” she has written.

Great Circle is a daringly ambitious novel, traversing in Marian’s story the history of early-20th-century aviation, Prohibition, the Great Depression and the second world war. Threaded through it is a parallel contemporary narrative, recounted by disgraced Hollywood starlet Hadley Baxter, who is trying to revive her career by playing Marian in a biopic. Hadley’s drily cynical voice has more than a touch of Fleabag about it, offering a knowing and prematurely jaded insider’s view of the movie industry (“my career is no longer a blow job-based barter economy,” she remarks). She is positioned as a counterpoint to Marian, whose pure and single-minded determination to fly contrasts sharply with Hadley’s tendency to drift through life with occasional bouts of self-sabotage. “I needed the relief of being someone who wasn’t afraid,” Hadley confesses. But both women, in their separate ways, are pursuing freedom in a male world that wants to confine them within preconceived ideas about who and what they should be. “We’re celebrated for marrying,” Marian writes to her twin brother, Jamie, “but after that we must cede all territory and answer to a new authority like a vanquished nation.”

Shipstead, who won the LA Times First Fiction prize for her bestselling debut, Seating Arrangements , writes with precision on both macro and micro levels, bringing a sure-footed fluency to descriptions of landscape, potted highlights of aviation history and close-up details of people and places (Prohibition-era prostitutes work out of basement apartments, “poking their heads up into the alleys like lascivious gophers”). The characters are preoccupied by questions of scale: Marian with the enormity of land and ocean seen from her cockpit; Jamie, an artist, with the impossibility of capturing grand visions on canvas: “Everything I want to paint is too big, and so I’ve started to think what I really want to paint is the too-bigness.” There is a sense that Shipstead, too, is inspired by the idea of creating on a vast canvas; this is a novel that invites the reader to immerse themselves in the sweep of history, the rich and detailed research, and part of the pleasure is being carried along by the narrative through all its digressions and backstories.

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Maggie Shipstead’s ‘Great Circle’ is a soaring work of historical fiction and a perfect summer novel

book review great circle by maggie shipstead

Maggie Shipstead may have been flying below your radar, but it’s long past time you spot her.

In 2012, she published “ Seating Arrangements ,” a smart romantic comedy about a WASPy wedding in New England. Two years later, she switched registers and released “ Astonish Me ,” a piercing novel about the cruel and beautiful world of ballet.

Her new book, “ Great Circle ,” is another surprising act of reinvention: a soaring work of historical fiction about a “lady pilot” in the mid-20th century. Indeed, so convincingly does Shipstead stitch her fictional heroine into the daring flight paths of early aviators that you’ll be convinced that you remember the tragic day her plane disappeared.

But this adventure begins in the water, not the air. As Europe descends into the carnage of World War I, somewhere in the North Atlantic an ocean liner carrying more than 500 passengers explodes. As luck would have it, the captain is traveling to England with his wife and newborn twins. When the night is shattered by the first alarm, he has every intention of remaining onboard during the chaotic effort to abandon ship, but in the dark and swelling panic, he fires his pistol and leaps onto a lifeboat while clutching his twins.

Shipstead creates this catastrophe in all its watery terror, but what’s even more impressive is the way she sets up these characters so that we feel the full weight of the fears and passions pulling on them as the boat burns and sinks. Although we’ll never see some of these people again, the author’s careful investment in them sets down a thicket of secrets and obligations that will play out over the coming decades.

Review: Maggie Shipstead’s ‘Astonish Me’

At the center of the vast story that develops are those rescued twins: Marian and Jamie Graves. With their mother lost at sea and their father in prison for abandoning his ship, the youngsters are raised by a kindly but inattentive uncle in Missoula, Mont. “They do not always go to school,” Shipstead notes. “If it is a splendidly sunny day or an enticingly snowy one, they might wander away somewhere else.” Their only friend is the son of a prostitute who lives in a sagging cabin nearby. “In summer all three swim naked in creeks and rivers.”

In that Edenic setting, Jamie develops an intense love for the natural world, but his sister, Marian, thirsts for even greater freedom. When she sees a pair of old circus pilots called the Flying Brayfogles, she’s transfixed. “Other barnstormers had come through town before, selling rides and doing aerobatics and parachute jumps,” Shipstead writes, “but Marian had never really noticed them, never considered how an airplane could pass over the mountains, over the horizon, carry people elsewhere . Maybe she had needed the dangerous proximity of the plane, its roar and the red flash of its wings to jolt her from obliviousness. Or maybe the moment was simply right. She was at an age when the future adult rattles the child’s bones like the bars of a cage.”

For the rest of her life — and the rest of this novel — Marian will crave the opportunity to fly. That aspiration, powered by her iron will, makes her a pest at the airfield where she begs for lessons. Soon enough she proves herself a remarkably talented flier. Again and again, though, Marian runs up against the chauvinism and incredulity of male pilots, including an industry just getting off the ground. Even the exigent demands of World War II aren’t enough to open the ranks fully, but Marian still finds a way to participate, so long as she can maintain the image of a proper, patriotic “girl.”

“Great Circle” is a relentlessly exciting story about a woman maneuvering her way between tradition and prejudice to get what she wants. It’s also a culturally rich story that takes full advantage of its extended length to explore the changing landscape of the 20th century. (In her acknowledgments, Shipstead wryly notes that “paring down an unwieldy thousand-page manuscript into this slender wisp of a thing was not an easy process.”) The novel frequently alludes to various real-life women who broke flight records, including, of course, Amelia Earhart, whose adventures sometimes echo Marian’s.

But Shipstead is particularly interested in the way attitudes about gender shape women’s expectations, desires and careers. Marian utterly rejects the gallant respect for her femininity, which she knows is just a pretty way of keeping her tethered and hooded like a tame falcon. To the alarm of almost everyone who claims to care for her, Marian’s dexterity in the air is matched by her fluid sexual identity.

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That’s a lot — I would argue enough — but Shipstead has boldly complicated this gripping historical novel by weaving in a modern-day story set in Hollywood. In alternate chapters, a young woman named Hadley describes her tumultuous career as a movie star. She plays the ingenue in the wildly popular “Archangel” films, a series based on the phenomenally popular “Archangel” novels. (Think “Fifty Shades of Grey.”) The work — embarrassing as it is — earns Hadley tens of millions of dollars, but it requires her to participate in a perpetual publicity campaign that eroticizes everything about her while holding her to a standard of quaint fidelity. When she shatters that image in a night of drunken debauchery that sets social media aflame, Hadley is summarily fired. Humiliated and out of work, she agrees to play Marian Graves in an artsy film based on the lost aviator’s life.

A novel that switches between two different periods and tones confronts the essential challenge of rendering both competing story lines engaging, and “Great Circle” struggles to make that case. Hollywood, with all its hypocrisy and excess, may be a fat target, but it’s also a tattered one, and Shipstead has far more success bringing 1914 to life than 2014. The extraordinary realism of Marian’s chapters can make the broad strokes of Hadley’s sections feel light in comparison.

But fortunately, when Hadley gets serious about discovering the real story of Marian, the novel’s parallel stories begin to resonate with each other in interesting ways. Though separated by decades, the aviator and the actress are both powerful women, rising from devastating tragedies to forge their own way.

Whether you’re planning a trip or settling in for a staycation, “Great Circle” is my top recommendation for this summer.

Ron Charles writes about books for The Washington Post and hosts TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com .

On May 4 at 6 p.m. ET, Maggie Shipstead will talk with Bethanne Patrick in a conversation sponsored by Politics and Prose Bookstore ( register ).

Great Circle

By Maggie Shipstead

Knopf. 593 pp. $28.95

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book review great circle by maggie shipstead

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GREAT CIRCLE

by Maggie Shipstead ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 4, 2021

Ingeniously structured and so damn entertaining; this novel is as ambitious as its heroines—but it never falls from the sky.

The intertwined journeys of an aviatrix born in 1914 and an actress cast to play her a century later.

In a novel twice as long as and an order of magnitude more complex than the well-received Seating Arrangements (2012) and Astonish Me (2014), Shipstead reveals breathtaking range and skill, expertly juggling a multigenerational historical epic and a scandal-soaked Hollywood satire, with scenes playing out on land, at sea, and in the air. "We were both products of vanishment and orphanhood and negligence and airplanes and uncles. She was like me but wasn't. She was uncanny, unknowable except for a few constellations I recognized from my own sky": These are the musings of actress Hadley Baxter. She has been familiar with the story of Marian Graves, an aviatrix who disappeared while trying to circumnavigate the globe, since she was just a little girl—before she became a pop-culture phenomenon, turned into a movie star with a mega-franchise, accidentally destroyed her career, and was given the chance to reinvent herself...by playing Marian in a biopic. The film, Peregrine , is based at least partly on the logbook of Marian's "great circle," which was found wrapped in a life preserver on an ice floe near the South Pole. Shipstead's story begins decades earlier, with the christening of the Josephina Eterna in Glasgow in 1909. The unhappy woman who breaks the bottle on her bow, the laconic captain who takes the ship to sea, the woman he beds onboard, the babies that result from this union—Marian Graves and her twin, Jamie—the uncle who has to raise them when their mother drowns and their father disappears: The destinies of every one of these people, and many more unforgettable characters, intersect in ways that reverberate through a hundred years of story. Whether Shipstead is creating scenes in the Prohibition-era American West, in wartime London, or on a Hollywood movie set, her research is as invisible as it should be, allowing a fully immersive experience.

Pub Date: May 4, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-525-65697-5

Page Count: 608

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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THE WOMEN

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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DEMON COPPERHEAD

by Barbara Kingsolver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022

An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.

Inspired by David Copperfield , Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.

It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.

Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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book review great circle by maggie shipstead

Review: Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

Great Circle Book Review

Great Circle was not what I expected, but I did end up liking it! Read on for my full review and find out what I didn’t expect.

The Synopsis

Spanning Prohibition-era Montana, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, New Zealand, wartime London, and modern-day Los Angeles, Great Circle tells the unforgettable story of a daredevil female aviator determined to chart her own course in life, at any cost.

After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There—after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes—Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles.

A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on Marian’s disappearance in Antarctica. Vibrant, canny, disgusted with the claustrophobia of Hollywood, Hadley is eager to redefine herself after a romantic film franchise has imprisoned her in the grip of cult celebrity. Her immersion into the character of Marian unfolds, thrillingly, alongside Marian’s own story, as the two women’s fates—and their hunger for self-determination in vastly different geographies and times—collide. Epic and emotional, meticulously researched and gloriously told, Great Circle is a monumental work of art, and a tremendous leap forward for the prodigiously gifted Maggie Shipstead.

This book was good and I enjoyed it, but it also wasn’t quite what I was expecting. I went into it expecting a lot of adventure, and the adventure was more in bits and pieces in between more family/friend/relationship content. I also had no idea that there would be so much sex and lust in this book! I don’t have a problem with sex and lust, but I just didn’t expect it. Lust, though, becomes a theme throughout the entire book: lust both for other humans and for what you really want in life.

Marian’s story was very well done. I felt like a really knew her as a character, understood her motives, and rooted for her throughout the book. Her life story was super interesting and fun to read.

Hadley, on the other hand…wasn’t my favorite. I’ve read some other reviews of this book and have seen that there are quite a few others who feel the same. I just didn’t think this book needed her side of things to be great. Marian’s story was so compelling, so unique, and so exciting, and Hadley’s was just not. I mean, it was okay, but it just felt unnecessary. In fact, the further on I got in the book, I felt like I was racing through Hadley’s parts to get back to Marian’s. At 600+ pages, I think Hadley’s part of the story just didn’t need to be there.

I also enjoyed the mystery portion of this book. You kind of know how it’s going to end, but you’re not exactly sure, and then as the book goes on, you get these clues that the end you thought was coming might actually not be coming. I loved the way Shipstead weaved that in there!

The adventure parts were, like I mentioned, a little less a part of the book than I thought they’d be when I first picked it up. However, that wasn’t really a negative, since the relationship/family portions were great too. In fact, they ended up being really necessary to really get into the book and understand Marian’s needs and wants and drives.

Overall, I liked Great Circle. It did start to get a bit long for me in the middle, especially during Hadley’s parts, but picked up as I got closer to the end. I gave this one a solid 4 stars.

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

I'm currently a full-time writer/content strategist with an English degree living in Minneapolis, MN. I created Literary Quicksand to feed my love of books, writing, and community. More About Me

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That sounds like an amzing book. Wasnt it nomainated for a Book Award as well?

It really was epic! It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

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Maggie Shipstead's Great Circle puts a smartly feminist spin on old-fashioned adventure: Review

The best-selling novelist tackles an entirely new genre in her hefty tome.

Leah Greenblatt is the critic at large at Entertainment Weekly , covering movies, music, books, and theater. She is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and has been writing for EW since 2004.

book review great circle by maggie shipstead

What if the most interesting man in the world was a woman? Marian Graves, the swashbuckling heroine of Great Circle , Maggie Shipstead 's sprawling new doorstop of a novel, is "an odd, tall, dusty, freckled girl" for whom gender fluidity is a gift, used largely in service of living the untethered life she dreams of — one that will take her from certain death in the frigid mid-Atlantic circa 1914 to Prohibition-era Montana, battle-torn World War II Europe, the ice floes of Antarctica, and beyond.

Pulled from the wreckage of a capsized ocean liner some two years after the Titanic and effectively orphaned, Marian and her twin brother are still infants when they're passed off to a bachelor uncle in Missoula and left to grow there like untended weeds, semi-feral and largely self-educated. The more subdued Jamie cultivates a quiet passion for painting, while his restless sibling devours fat tomes on Shakespeare and faraway lands, and, by her early teens, discovers the medium that will set her free: flight. Hair cropped and bony knees covertly trousered, she becomes a local bootlegger's errand "boy" to help earn her aviation wings; the job brings enough money for flying lessons, and soon an eager benefactor, too — the first of many men (and at least one woman) who will strive, vainly, to contain her.

Shipstead ( Astonish Me ) has more than enough raw material in her muse to sustain the nearly 600 pages that follow. Yet into all that she also weaves the wry modern-day musings of an actress named Hadley Baxter, the disgraced star of a YA fantasy franchise whose best shot at Hollywood redemption may be a Marian biopic. Hadley's tart contributions fade in the book's back half, and the story takes occasional swerves into soapiness and coincidence as it moves between timelines and datelines. But in a moment when our quarantined worlds have become so small — whole months measured not in continents or nautical miles but square inches of living room carpet — Great Circle offers more than just wanderlust; it feels like a liberation by proxy, too. Grade: B+

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‘Great Circle’ Review: Soaring Storylines Brought Down to Earth With Beautiful Prose

Cover for "Nancy" by Maggie Shipstead,

Maggie Shipstead’s upcoming novel “Great Circle'' is unbelievably expansive both in setting and scope. Set to be released in May 2021 the book combines interwoven narratives circulating around the story of Marian Graves, who, in her valiant attempt to become the first pilot to circumvent the globe north to south over the poles, disappears in Antarctica in 1950. Featuring an ensemble cast of characters from Marian’s past, present, and future, ‘Great Circle’ explores all of the different ways in which we are remembered and our stories are told.

The brilliance of Shipstead’s storytelling is in her character work. The cast of characters in “Great Circle” are intricate and complex in their own right — each being deeply flawed and therefore deeply human. Despite the inherent focus of Marian’s narrative, each supporting role is well developed and distinctly unique in both their personality as well as their motivations. The rotation of perspective ultimately helps propel the reader through what would otherwise be an incredibly long and complex plot.

Though the plotlines come second to the character development, “Great Circle” delves into the gamut of human experience, from romance to war to grief. That being said, there are some parts of this book that drag, and it is a novel that will take time and energy to fully delve into. Especially towards the beginning, where the reader is introduced to so many perspectives, it can be difficult to fully invest in the narrative without a clear understanding as to why each mini-story is important quite yet. Combined with the fact that the novel has a complex non-linear timeline, this story is not instantaneously engrossing, but it builds until it is difficult to put down. To be fair, no other story structure would so cleverly aid the larger ideals at the heart of the novel — that moments matter and influence the events that follow — but the drag in pacing is an unavoidable downside to the novel.

However, despite the particular mode of storytelling, this book is deeply satisfying. The sometimes arduous reading culminates in a completely extraordinary ending. This point is not to say that the ending is neatly tied up in a bow — the finale is just as beautifully messy and bittersweet as the rest of the book — but rather there is such a special sense of fulfillment and completeness that radiates from the conclusion of “Great Circle.” It is a novel that forces its audience to reflect deeply, not only upon their own personal origin stories, but on the many stories that have interwoven to influence their lives.

A particularly disappointing aspect of “Great Circle” comes from its marketing — the book is described as a dual story of Marian Graves and Hadley Baxter, a modern day actress with an eerily similar backstory to Marian who has recently been cast to play Graves in a film. While Hadley is by far the most prominent secondary character, her story still primarily revolved around finding out Marian’s life through her own journey. Though this decision made the overall narrative and themes stronger, Hadley is one of the most intriguing characters, and it’s a shame readers don’t get as much time with her as the book’s description seemed to promise.

Regardless, Shipstead’s work is still wildly enchanting, with expertly crafted prose and enchanting imagery. “Great Circle” is a novel about lofty ideals of truth, purpose, and connection across time and space, brought down to earth by a dynamic and complex cast of characters. If a reader is willing to give this novel the time it requires, the story’s universal appeal shines through.

—Staff Writer Madi L. Fabber can be reached at [email protected].

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Maggie Shipstead's Great Circle Is The Literary Escape of Summer 2021

This high-flying feminist epic will take you away.

circle

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The pleasures of being a books editor are many. Each day is like Christmas, with deliveries from publishers arriving at my office—or now, my doorstep at home—on a near hourly basis. Being that books have been some of my steadiest and most coveted companions from the time I was a little girl, it's a surprise—even to me—that my sense of anticipation every time I open a new one has never diminished. Are you the one?

I brought the backup reads in case Great Circle fizzled in the middle, but no alternates were needed. By the first lines, I was all in: "I was born to be a wanderer. I was shaped to the earth like a seabird to a wave. Some birds fly until they die. I have made a promise to myself: My last descent won't be the tumbling, helpless kind but sharp gannet plunge—a dive with intent, aimed at something deep in the sea."

Insert deep, satisfied sigh.

We are first introduced to protagonist Marian Graves as an infant, along with her twin brother, Jamie, on a sinking ocean liner their father is captain of. As their mother is nowhere to be found, their father must choose whether to hand his babies over to strangers in a lifeboat and stay with his ship, or break all the rules and board the lifeboat with them. That decision forever alters all their lives.

Great Circle

Great Circle

Marian and Jamie are left in the wilds of Montana to be cared for by an eccentric, alcoholic uncle who gambles away every spare penny. But whatever hardships Marian suffers over the course of the next years, what gets her through is her dream of becoming an aviator. This is in the early part of the 20th century, when such dreams for women were seen as sheer fantasy. But Marian is determined, fearless, wild, and her first flying lesson is a liberation. Soon, she is a pilot for a bootlegger who's also her lover, piloting small planes filled with contraband into remote territories, at times through rough weather that would have grounded a more cautious pilot. The risks thrill her.

The novel has a radical streak. Marian is not of the modern era, yet she evolves into a character who would today be referred to as gender-fluid. She loves women and men, and is often mistaken for a man, with her choppy short hair and masculine dress. Marian cares nothing for what society thinks of her.

Shipstead also experiments with point-of-view and timelines. She expertly moves from narrator to narrator and even into the 21st century to a plot involving Hadley, a famous young actress whose affair with a man not her co-star/boyfriend alienates her fans and producers. The scandal almost costs her career, until she is offered the starring role in an indie about an aviator named...Marian Graves.

The most exhilarating sections of the novel, though, occur when Marian is aloft, circumnavigating the globe over the North and South Poles, attempting to fulfill her lifelong goal of achieving what no pilot has before. She and her lone navigator fly that plane as if fleeing the world itself. They are exuberant, reckless, unstoppable—and always on the edge of mortal fear. But that fear fuels them, and makes them feel more awake than ever before.

What does the title Great Circle refer to? Yes, it's about the earth's shape and a pilot's path. But it's also about how each life—big, small, well-known, anonymous—is both a blip on a night sky and capable of legacy. One aha moment can redirect everything. What Maggie Shipstead has done with this book is deliver a series of ahas, of sweet, provocative points of contemplation that make the reader feel as alive as Marian did in that plane.

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Leigh Haber is Vice President, Books, Oprah Daily and O Quarterly. She is also Director of Oprah's Book Club. 

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Maggie Shipstead, author of Great Circle, on Greenland’s ice sheet

The True Story Behind Maggie Shipstead’s ‘Great Circle’

The bestselling author’s latest novel was informed by years of researching the history of female aviation and traveling to far-flung places

Maggie Shipstead, author of Great Circle, on Greenland’s ice sheet

Heading out the door? Read this article on the Outside app available now on iOS devices for members! >","name":"in-content-cta","type":"link"}}'>Download the app .

Often when we talk about a big, ambitious book, we reach for the language of geography. We describe the terrain it covers; we say that it sprawls, or ranges widely. The book is framed as a kind of passage through the world: we might talk about a protagonist’s journey, or an author’s exploration of a topic.

In award-winning author Maggie Shipstead’s new novel, all of those analogies are made literal. 

Great Circle ’s 600 pages span a full century and the entire planet. The book tells the story of Marian Graves, a fictional female pilot who disappeared in 1950 while attempting an unprecedented north-south circumnavigation of the earth. She had only one leg left in her trip, a final leap from Antarctica to New Zealand , when she vanished, Earhart-style, in the South Pacific. Shipstead takes readers through the events of Marian’s life leading up to that moment, from her parents’ doomed marriage and her unorthodox childhood, roaming semi-feral with her twin brother in the Montana woods, to the complex web of desires, ambitions, and romantic entanglements that prompt her to her final flight. 

Braided with Marian’s story is a contemporary narrative. Hadley Baxter, a troubled young Hollywood starlet, attempts to rebound from scandal by playing Marian in an Oscar-bait biopic. But Marian and Hadley have more in common than a casting decision: Hadley’s own parents crashed into Lake Superior in a small plane when she was a toddler, and like Marian, she was raised, to the extent that she was raised at all, by a dissolute uncle. Her parents’ fate matches what’s known of her character’s final act, and while Marian yearns for the sky, the specter of what she calls the “sharp gannet plunge” of lives being extinguished in cold, dark water looms throughout both timelines.

Great Circle is a big novel but not a daunting one: an impressive array of historical research is integrated seamlessly, and the story is propulsive. The characters are compelling, and their choices, even the extraordinary ones, make sense within their worlds. Shipstead’s sentences are luminous, her metaphors precise: a luxury steamship crossing the North Atlantic at night is “a jeweled brooch on black satin”; in the present day, Hadley looks down from a hillside mansion at “the big flat circuit board of Los Angeles planing off into the pale haze.” Anyone who’s felt a little plane rattle up off a rough dirt runway will recognize their experience in Marian’s; anyone who hasn’t will get a taste of the sensation.

book review great circle by maggie shipstead

Those details were earned through deep research, trips to the archives, and Shipstead’s own experiences. She grew up in Orange County, California, and is now based in Los Angeles, where many of her friends work, in one way or another, in the film industry. She has written two previous and very well-regarded novels: Seating Arrangements , an award-winning New York Times bestseller, and Astonish Me . She was traveling between her first and second release, figuring out what to work on next, when she got the idea for Great Circle . 

Shipstead was in Auckland, New Zealand, and spotted a statue of Jean Batten , the first pilot to fly solo from England to New Zealand, outside the city’s main airport terminal. Batten was one of a cohort of female pilots who were enormously famous in the early, daring years of aviation but who have since largely slipped from mainstream public memory. The exception, Amelia Earhart, is known more for her disappearance than her accomplishments. The rich history of female aviation, and how little of it we choose to remember, got Shipstead chewing on narrative ideas that involve disappearance and death. “It’s so often the same thing,” she says, “but as a society we process it really differently.”

Shipstead let the idea linger for a couple of years before really sitting down to write in the fall of 2014. Around that time, she also began to get assignments to write travel stories for various glossy magazines ( including Outside ), and a fruitful cross-fertilization began. Over several years, her reporting took her to the far-flung islands of the Pacific—Hawaii, the Cook Islands, sub-Antarctic New Zealand—and around the circumpolar region, from Greenland and Alaska to Svalbard, in Arctic Norway, and the Canadian high Arctic. The map of Marian’s journey began to take shape. 

The trickiest and most critical place to reach was Antarctica. The southern continent was crucial to the story of Marian’s disappearance, and Shipstead says she didn’t think she could imagine her way through it. Landing on the Greenland ice sheet in a C-130 for a travel story would give her some sense of the flat, frozen immensity at the poles, but she wanted more. The gap in her research was resolved unexpectedly: on an assignment to the sub-Antarctic, she met an expedition leader who worked in the region and they hit it off. He invited her along on a cruise, and so, she says, “our first date, really, was a five-week-long sea voyage to Antarctic. That was a really strange way of getting that wish granted.”

The rich history of female aviation, and how little of it we choose to remember, got Shipstead chewing on narrative ideas that involve disappearance and death.

There were other lucky breaks. During a visit to an aviation museum in Missoula, Montana, Marian’s hometown, Shipstead was hanging around, sitting in the cockpit of a vintage airplane on display, when she was invited along by a couple of pilots who were taking a 1927 Travel Air 6000 up for a spin. “That became the plane that Marian learned to fly, because I’d been in it, I’d been in the actual aircraft, in the exact right place,” she says. “That was really serendipitous and incredibly useful.”

Shipstead’s travels were supplemented by wide-ranging research into the times and places that Marian and her brother, Jamie,   pass through. The early history of aviation is woven into the fabric of the novel, but so is the story of Prohibition-era Montana, of bootleggers and cross-border flights to Canada. When World War II breaks out in Europe in 1939, the novel absorbs and makes use of several little-known pockets of history: the “combat artists” who painted and drew the front lines for the United States military; the crew of female pilots in England who flew warplanes around from base to base before their next missions across the channel; the bloody battles in remote corners of the world, like the Aleutian Islands. “Once I came across it, in it went,” she says.

Shipstead’s brother, a former pilot and Air Force veteran who, like Marian, had grown up intoxicated by airplanes, helped with the technical details, like what models of planes Marian might have flown and how far she could have gone on a tank of fuel. Shipstead wanted Marian’s circumnavigation plan to have been just barely within the realm of feasibility at the time she made the attempt—nearly impossible but not completely out of reach. That largely determined the timing of the flight in the novel, which matched up with a real-life Antarctic expedition that could have offered Marian a refuelling station, and with the existence of several new postwar runways in the South Pacific. Shipstead knows she may not satisfy every detail-loving aviation buff out there, but, she says, “I tried to keep it all tethered to reality as much as possible.”

I’ve spent a lot of time in Cessnas and Twin Otters, taking off from or landing on ice and ocean and earth, so I felt very at home in Marian’s world. At first, Hadley’s share of Great Circle felt like an interruption to me. But as the novel unspooled, I appreciated her perspective more and more. A lifetime after Marian’s disappearance, the filmmakers try to reconstruct her, but to a reader, it’s clear that the gap between her life and their story is a yawning crevasse. The contemporary timeline shows us how much is lost when a person dies or disappears and how much becomes unknowable, no matter how much historical research we might dig up. 

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Author Interviews

'great circle' takes flight across decades and continents.

SSimon

Scott Simon

Great Circle, by Maggie Shipstead

Maggie Shipstead's new Great Circle is one of the most anticipated novels of the spring. At a time when so many of us have been cooped up, her novel ranges around the world in over a century, from Alaska to the South Pole, over the open skies of the Pacific in the Battle of Britain, past shipwrecks, plane crashes, shattered romances, world wars, Lake Superior, Scotland, Montana and Hollywood.

It tells the intertwined life stories of Marian Graves, a dauntless flyer who was once more or less orphaned with her twin brother Jamie in a 1914 shipwreck, and an actress named Hadley Baxter, who portrays her in a film.

Keeping all of those places and people straight in her mind "was definitely an overwhelming task," says Shipstead. "And I started without a plan. I just had to kind of dive in and start writing."

Interview Highlights

On being inspired by Amelia Earhart

She was certainly part of my earliest inspiration, because I'm really intrigued by this question of, what's the difference between disappearance and death. Practically speaking, they're often the same thing. In Amelia Earhart's case, I think it's almost a certainty she crashed into the ocean and drowned. But because there's no trace, as there wouldn't be, it's sort of fertilized decades of all these different theories and ideas. And so I wanted to sort of come at that question without making my character too much like Earhart herself.

On recreating Antarctic research station Little America III

'Astonish Me' Asks, Is It Enough To Only Be Good?

'Astonish Me' Asks, Is It Enough To Only Be Good?

With 'Arrangements' And 'The Rest,' Two Debut Novelists Arrive

Book Reviews

With 'arrangements' and 'the rest,' two debut novelists arrive.

So this was one of Richard Byrd's expedition bases. And in Antarctica ... actually built on the the Ross Ice Shelf, floating ice shelf. I read his accounts of his expeditions and what I could find by other members of them. And there are some photographs. It was a little confusing because Little America existed in multiple iterations. I have been to the Ross Ice Shelf. I've seen the edge of it, although the piece of ice where Little America was has long since broken off and floated away and returned to the ocean.

On finishing the novel, compared to finishing something like an Antarctic expedition

I definitely was depleted by this book by the time I was done, I took pretty much everything I was preoccupied with and thinking about during this time, I did a lot of travel, both coincidentally and for the purposes of seeing this place, it was really important to me to see Antarctica, it was important to me to see the Arctic. And so I certainly felt a sense of relief at the end. But then, of course, I think as with expeditioners, the question arises of now what? You know, the center of my life was suddenly gone and facing the blank page again for the first time in seven years was not easy.

On never knowing for sure what happened in the past

Part of the reason I wanted to include Hadley, the movie star character in the more modern timeline, was because I wanted to get that idea of the unknowability of other people through this lens of somebody 60 or 70 years later trying to piece together a life and a person. It's just not possible. And really, the second any of us dies, we take almost all of ourselves with us.

This story was produced for radio by Danny Hensel and D. Parvaz, and adapted for the web by Petra Mayer.

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BookBrowse Reviews Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

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Great Circle

by Maggie Shipstead

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

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This stellar historical novel explores the lives of a groundbreaking aviatrix in the first half of the 20th century and the actress slated to play her a century later.

Maggie Shipstead's Great Circle follows the lives of two fictional women: Prohibition-era aviatrix Marian Graves and contemporary actress Hadley Baxter, who lands the role of Marian in an upcoming movie. When approached about the film, Hadley has just blown up her life by creating a scandal she knew would likely get her ousted from the franchise that made her career. Feeling a certain kinship with Marian (both were orphaned as infants and raised by dissolute uncles), she accepts the role, dreaming of Oscar glory for her participation in her first "serious" film. Alternating with Hadley's first-person account is the third-person narration of Marian's life, from the circumstances surrounding her birth to her fate decades later. The bulk of the story is Marian's, and Shipstead fleshes out her life in such believable detail I found it hard to remember the character wasn't a real person. Although Marian's passion for flying underlies every part of her narrative, the book is less about her exploits as a pilot and the lengths she goes to achieve her aims and more about her journey of self-discovery. The author brilliantly illustrates the many factors in Marian's life that mold her into the person she becomes by her last flight. We develop an in-depth understanding of this remarkable character and are loath to let her go. Hadley's chapters are briefer, and although they cover a shorter time period, her journey feels just as real as Marian's. She's pretty obnoxious at first, a stereotypical entitled Hollywood starlet, but as she becomes more involved with the film and the people behind its production, she develops a complexity that ultimately makes her more sympathetic. As with Marian, the author creates a multifaceted character in Hadley, one who feels real to the reader. Shipstead's writing is gorgeous from start to finish, whether she's describing the countryside ("October leans into November. The trees are topped with gold, the cottonwoods bright as apricot flesh. The landscape flares and shimmers"); Marion's observations ("With the right instruments, you have a fighting chance of leveling out even if the cloud goes all the way down and brushes the earth like the marabou hem of a diaphanous white robe worn by God"); or Hadley's perceptions ("[S]he just sat there and stared like she was trying to turn me to stone with her mind. Or maybe she couldn't move her face. She's starting to have work done. In twenty years she'll be a skin balloon with eyeholes"). There's just enough of this lush writing to entertain, but not so much that it bogs down the narrative. Also interspersed are bits of aviation history as they occurred during Marion's timeline. For example, the author inserts a couple of paragraphs about Charles Lindbergh's historic transatlantic flight in 1927 that occurs just as 13-year-old Marion is becoming acquainted with a pair of barnstormers who take her on her first flights. I occasionally find dual timelines confusing or annoying (sometimes the characters are too similar, sometimes the jump between them happens too frequently, sometimes I feel one or more storyline could have been jettisoned, etc.). Such was not the case with Great Circle . Switches between the two stories are so expertly crafted I'm hard-pressed to name a novel that accomplishes this feat more skillfully. At around 600 pages, the book is also quite long; however, I never felt like it was a slog. I'll sometimes come across a doorstopper and think about how it could have been edited into a more manageable length, but not this time; there's not a single sentence I'd have wanted left out. Although I wouldn't call it a page-turner, its pacing is excellent and it kept me engaged, start to finish. Great Circle is one of my favorites of the year so far, and I'd unhesitatingly suggest it to anyone looking for an exquisite, character-driven work of literature.

book review great circle by maggie shipstead

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Great Circle

A Novel (Man Booker Prize Finalist)

By Maggie Shipstead

By maggie shipstead read by cassandra campbell and alex mckenna, category: literary fiction | women's fiction, category: literary fiction | women's fiction | audiobooks.

Apr 05, 2022 | ISBN 9781984897701 | 5-3/16 x 8 --> | ISBN 9781984897701 --> Buy

Jun 01, 2021 | ISBN 9780593459416 | 6-1/8 x 9-1/4 --> | ISBN 9780593459416 --> Buy

May 04, 2021 | ISBN 9780525656982 | ISBN 9780525656982 --> Buy

May 04, 2021 | 1517 Minutes | ISBN 9780593155059 --> Buy

Buy from Other Retailers:

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

Apr 05, 2022 | ISBN 9781984897701

Jun 01, 2021 | ISBN 9780593459416

May 04, 2021 | ISBN 9780525656982

May 04, 2021 | ISBN 9780593155059

1517 Minutes

Buy the Audiobook Download:

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About Great Circle

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK • The unforgettable story of a daredevil female aviator determined to chart her own course in life, at any cost: an “epic trip—through Prohibition and World War II, from Montana to London to present-day Hollywood—and you’ll relish every minute” ( People ). After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There–after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes–Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles. A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on Marian’s disappearance in Antarctica. Vibrant, canny, disgusted with the claustrophobia of Hollywood, Hadley is eager to redefine herself after a romantic film franchise has imprisoned her in the grip of cult celebrity. Her immersion into the character of Marian unfolds, thrillingly, alongside Marian’s own story, as the two women’s fates–and their hunger for self-determination in vastly different geographies and times–collide. Epic and emotional, meticulously researched and gloriously told, Great Circle is a monumental work of art, and a tremendous leap forward for the prodigiously gifted Maggie Shipstead.

Listen to a sample from Great Circle

Also by maggie shipstead.

Astonish Me

About Maggie Shipstead

MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD is the New York Times-bestselling author of three novels and a short story collection. Her novel Great Circle was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and is currently a finalist for the Women’s Prize. She is a graduate of… More about Maggie Shipstead

Product Details

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WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION NOMINEE • BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: TIME, NPR, Washington Post, EW, Boston Globe, LitHub, and more “ Great Circle is a masterpiece . . . one of the best books I’ve ever read” —J. Courtney Sullivan “A sumptuous epic . . . exhilarating . . . this book delivers a series of ahas, of sweet, provocative points of contemplation that make the reader feel alive.” —Leigh Haber, Oprah Daily “A soaring work of historical fiction . . . So convincingly does Shipstead stitch her fictional heroine into the daring flight paths of early aviators that you’ll be convinced that you remember the tragic day her plane disappeared. Great Circle is a relentlessly exciting story about a woman maneuvering her way between tradition and prejudice to get what she wants. It’s also a culturally rich story that takes full advantage of its extended length to explore the changing landscape of the 20th century. My top recommendation for this summer.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post   “A feat of a story in every sense.” — Entertainment Weekly “Shipstead’s writing soars and dips with dizzying flair . . . With detailed brilliance, she lavishes heart and empathy on every character (save one villain), no matter how small their role. Many authors attempting to create an epic falter at the end, but Shipstead never wavers, pulls out a twist or two that feel fully earned, and then sticks the landing. An expansive story that covers more than a century and seems to encapsulate the whole wide world. ” — Boston Globe “Thrilling . . . Great Circle starts high and maintains altitude. One might say it soars. An action-packed book rich with character . . . Great Circle grasps for and ultimately reaches something extraordinary. It pulls off this feat through individual sentences and sensations—by getting each secondary and tertiary character right . . . What’s so impressive is how deeply we come to care about each of these people, and how the shape and texture of each of their stories collide to build a story all its own. It’s at the level of the sentence and the scene, the small but unforgettable salient detail, that books finally succeed or fail. In that, Great Circle is consistently, often breathtakingly, sound.” —Lynn Steger Strong, The New York Times Book Review    “Shipstead’s eye for detail, character and the moments that tell all make this a true literary achievement.” — Z ibby Owens, Good Morning America “ Great Circle is an epic trip—through Prohibition and World War II, from Montana to London to present-day Hollywood—and you’ll relish every minute.” — People  “Swinging from one century to the next, from the moneyed splendor of cities to the shifting Antarctic ice, Shipstead’s prose overflows with meticulous detail. Shipstead’s intellect and knowledge are on full display . . . One finds twists and surprises, unexpected connections—though the work’s ultimate interest mirrors a quality shared by the Graves twins: a natural, boundless curiosity.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune   “Bestselling novelist Maggie Shipstead was struggling to depict a female adventurer. So she became one. Shipstead’s debut, Seating Arrangements, [sealed] her reputation as an impeccable craftswoman of upmarket beach reads . . . But the stakes of Great Circle are higher—for its heroine, literally life or death. Though Shipstead never learned to fly herself, she aligned with her main character Marian Graves in more important ways . . . She is interested in testing her limits.” — Los Angeles Times “Glitz and guts square off in Great Circle: a tale of two women set apart by a century, fighting to retain control of their own lives in a society that demands subservience. Shipstead is adept at writing so vividly, the reader can feel the thrill and pain of her characters. Cunningly crafted. . . richly layered, a joy to read . . . riveting.” — The Spokesman-Review   “Marian Graves’s 1950s quest, a pole-to-pole route around the globe, will not be truly finished until twenty-first-century Hadley Baxter is cast as the film version of Marian—not because the two women share history, letters, or mementos (those common tropes of historical fiction), but because of their shared dissatisfaction with the patriarchal system guiding their lives . . . A novel with rich prose and even richer symbolism.” —Bethanne Patrick, Virtuoso   “In one word: fantastic. Shipstead’s writing is absolutely stunning, each character coming to life through her mesmerizing descriptions and masterful imagery. Each high is ridden along with Marian, each low felt intensely and deeply as though it were happening in real-time. Even the most technical details—such as complexities regarding airplanes and machinery—jump off the page, drawing the reader in. Shipstead sets the scene of each location striking beauty and detail . . . She has created a world so unique and filled with such riveting characters that it is devastating to have to leave them behind.” —Ally Kutz, Erie Reader “The Marian portions rove from Montana to Manhattan to Scotland and Antarctica, and read like a carnival of early-20th-century American history, packed with bootleggers, treacherous boxcar rides, and tragic shipwrecks. The Hadley chapters offer a delectable dissection of life as a celebrity, serving up an intelligent skewering of the Hollywood machine and allowing the book to take flight.” — Vogue “A breathtaking epic . . . This is a stunning feat.” —Publishers Weekly [starred review] “A fat, juicy peach of a novel . . . A tremendously well-written book, epic in spirit and scope, swooping across continents and through time so effortlessly that it belies the seven years it apparently took to complete.” — The Telegraph [UK] “A sweeping, swashbuckling book, full of colour and grand destiny . . . glorious mythmaking. This is a novel of magnitude in all senses: themes, size, scope and ambition. Its literary wingspan stretches from the tectonic bump-and-grind of the ice age to the erotic imaginings of internet fan fiction . . . The joy of this dynamic, soaring novel is not a welcome extra but its very engine. Most novelists have their limits and cut their cloth accordingly. Shipstead is a writer who can vividly summon whatever she chooses, taking the reader deep inside the worlds she creates . . . Her writing is confident and knowing; her descriptions of light and air sometimes beautiful. Marian Graves is a character so real that I twice googled her to check.” — Financial Times [UK] “The destinies of [Shipstead’s] unforgettable characters intersect in ways that reverberate through a hundred years of story. Whether Shipstead is creating scenes in the Prohibition-era American West, in wartime London, or on a Hollywood movie set, her research is as invisible as it should be, allowing a fully immersive experience. Ingeniously structured and so damn entertaining; this novel is as ambitious as its heroines—but it never falls from the sky.” — Kirkus Reviews [starred review] “Highly recommended—intricately designed, [with a] compelling cast of characters. As Hadley learns some of Marian’s secrets, readers will wonder how much we can truly know anyone.” —Library Journal [starred review] “Transcendent . . . A rolling, roiling epic . . . Through the interwoven stories of impetuous flyer Marian Graves and flavor-of-the-month actress Hadley Baxter, Shipstead ponders the motivating forces behind acts of daring defiance, self-fulfillment and self-destruction. An ambitious, soaring saga—[Shipstead] takes her characters to dizzying heights, drawing readers into lives of courage and mystery.” —Booklist “Inherently epic . . .Shipstead sweeps readers from earth to sky and back again . . . Underpinning it all is a reverence for nature, thrumming in the forests of Montana, the jagged peaks of Alaska and the stupefying ice shelves of the Antarctic. Shipstead’s exhilarating, masterful depictions of Marian’s flights feel like shared experiences that invite readers to contemplate both magnitude and majesty. Great Circle is sure to give even firmly earthbound readers a new appreciation for those who are compelled ever skyward.” –BookPage [starred review]

Booker Prize SHORTLIST 2021

Historical Writers’ Association Non-Fiction Crown Award SHORTLIST 2022

Women’s Prize for Fiction SHORTLIST 2022

Author Q&A

Who came first: Hadley Baxter or Marian Graves?  Marian Graves came first, but Hadley Baxter wasn’t far behind. I had started writing  Great Circle  from what is still the beginning, on Marian’s timeline, but I didn’t feel fully committed to the project until I had the idea for Hadley. Because I don’t outline or plan plot out in advance for my books, I need a few elements to come together before I hit critical momentum and feel like I know what I’m doing. This might be as simple as a character and one central event (that’s what I started with for  Seating Arrangements ), or it might be structure and character (structure was what kickstarted me with  Astonish Me ). In this case, it was Marian’s character, Hadley’s voice, and also the question I’d been batting around about the meaning of disappearance. Despite living in two different centuries, Hadley and Marian’s lives converge and intersect in surprising, beautiful ways, including their yearning for freedom. In what ways do you think Hadley and Marian both feel restricted by their moment in time? Definitely both feel pressures inherent to being women and specific to their eras. It’s Marian’s both good and bad fortune to have an extremely unsupervised, unrestricted childhood, and so she doesn’t quite understand the social limitations placed on her gender until she’s deep in her adolescence and starts coming up against some real-world obstacles that take her a bit by surprise. Living outside gender norms in the 1920s-1940s took a huge amount of energy and determination; for her to lead the life she wants turns out to be exhausting and involves major sacrifices and consequences. Because she’s so determined to be a pilot, in some ways she’s blinded to the full weight of the trade-offs she’s making in pursuit of that dream, and she doesn’t see how she might find herself trapped by her own choices until it’s too late. Then, down the road, when she’s older, her wariness of losing her freedom profoundly shapes her, too. Her life becomes a kind of fortress that she feels like she has to constantly defend from invasion. As for Hadley, a movie star in the 2010s, one of the major forces working on her is an expectation that unless she keeps becoming a bigger and bigger star, she’s failing. Nothing’s ever enough. She finds herself behaving in erratic, self-destructive ways that are semi-subconscious attempts to escape from the impossible hamster wheel she’s running full speed on. She’s looking for an alternative way of being, but she can’t imagine what that is. And it almost goes without saying that, as someone who’s famous and female, she lives with an absolutely savage and oppressive baseline public scrutiny of her body and behavior that’s much more overbearing than what her male professional counterparts endure.   As Hadley learns more about Marian’s life to prepare for her role in  Peregrine , what aspects of Marian’s life and legacy do you think Hadley feels most drawn to? I think Hadley is particularly intrigued by the qualities she sees as being present in Marian and missing in herself. She sees Marian as someone who not only knew exactly what she wanted to do—to fly around the world over the poles—but who was possessed by this desire and was willing to take huge risks in pursuit of it. The role of Marian comes to Hadley at a moment when she’s adrift and confused, and she craves the kind of certainty and direction that she perceives in Marian. She wishes she wanted to do something (anything!) the way Marian had wanted to fly, and she has an amorphous sort of hope that she’ll be able to find her way through her own life by inhabiting Marian. Of course, the reality of Marian’s life was more complicated, but Hadley, as we all do when we look at figures from the past, is seeing through the lens of her own experience and her own moment.   GREAT CIRCLE spans whole continents as you chart Marian’s dream of circumnavigating the globe. How much of your own travels informed the scale and scope of the novel? I’m not sure I would have felt comfortable writing this book in the same way, especially the sections about Marian’s round-the-world flight, if I hadn’t been to most of the locations, particularly the polar ones, which are so alien to most of us that you can’t say, well, I’ve been to X similar place so I think I have the idea. There really aren’t similar places. It’s absolutely possible to use settings in fiction when you haven’t actually been there, but because this book is so explicitly  about  the places and about someone wanting to see these places, the specifics took on more weight than if the places were serving more as simple backdrops. I was absolutely determined to get to Antarctica, and I truly believe I wouldn’t have been able to imagine it without having seen it. But also, when you go to Antarctica by ship, as almost all tourists do, you don’t see the interior, this endless uninterrupted sheet of ice, which was important to the story. So that became something else I wanted to experience firsthand, and I managed to get a magazine assignment that involved landing in a plane on Greenland’s ice sheet. When you try to imagine standing in a perfect flat disk of white that reaches all the way to the horizon, you can possibly imagine the visual, but you can’t imagine the scale and the strange feeling of precariousness. During the years I was writing the book, I chased after ways of getting where I wanted to go (often by writing travel features) but then I also found that places I happened to go incidentally made their way into the book and enriched and expanded it. I’m not sure I would have used Alaska as a setting if I hadn’t gone there twice during the time I was writing, once with a boyfriend and once on assignment. As I traveled, I felt like I was a raccoon out gathering shiny treasures and bringing them back to add to my hoard. I like to travel for its own sake, but I also valued my trips because my life felt more integrated with the work of writing the novel than if I’d just been sitting in a room toiling away, although there was  plenty  of that.   So much of this book is about searching for closure, trying to complete the circle, so to speak. To what extent do you think Hadley and Marian achieve this in their own lives? I’ve never felt confident about how possible closure is or what it really means in practice. I suspect that closure is much more of a process and a function of time passing than a decisive moment. Maybe closure is something that shifts your thinking about an event or a relationship and alleviates some of the surrounding emotional intensity or struggle, and that change lets you move forward?  I think both Hadley and Marian succeed in changing and moving forward to some degree, in that they’re both able to change the trajectories of their lives. As Marian points out, though, the end and beginning of the circle are the same point, so it seems possible that the sense of completion she thinks she’s chasing can only be found by veering away from the path.   What real women in history do you think Marian would walk alongside? Were there any in particular that informed her character as you were writing? I read about a lot of different female pilots while I was writing, most of whom are forgotten and none of whom are as famous as Amelia Earhart, who is the person everyone thinks of when I describe the book. Certainly Amelia Earhart was one of my portals into the story because I was interested in this idea of disappearance and how it’s often the same thing as death but, from the outside, has different emotional content. By far the most likely end of Amelia Earhart’s story is that she ran out of fuel, crashed into the ocean, and drowned. But people have a really hard time accepting that and have spent most of a century concocting alternative stories. Why? That question is very interesting to me. But Amelia’s character and personality have little in common with Marian’s. There’s no real life woman I modeled her after, but I absolutely drew inspiration from the bravery and determination of early female pilots—Beryl Markham, Elinor Smith, Jean Batten, Amy Johnson, Bessie Coleman, Jackie Cochran, just to name a few—and from women who, like Marian, transported military planes during World War II. I went to the Hoover Institution’s archives at Stanford and spent a few days reading the letters and papers of a few of the American women who flew in the Air Transport Auxiliary in the UK, and that was enormously helpful.   What do you hope readers take away from this book? What feeling do you hope they’re left with? I hope readers take away a renewed curiosity about the physical world. I think you can bring a commitment to exploration into your everyday life just by choosing to be observant and to be open to simple wonders, like just the wild birds and animals that live around us, even in cities, or, I don’t know, the weather or what you see from the window of an airplane. It’s all pretty amazing, really. A friend asked me what the book is about in one word, and I said, without hesitation, “scale.” It’s not the sexiest description, but when you think about the scale of the planet, the scale of a life—these things are both tiny and enormous, and I feel a sense of awe about that. I think I hope readers come to feel that way, too.   What single word would you use to describe the feeling of flight? Potential.

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Little America III, Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica March 4, 1950

I was born to be a wanderer. I was shaped to the earth like a seabird to a wave. Some birds fly until they die. I have made a promise to myself: My last descent won’t be the tumbling helpless kind but a sharp gannet plunge—a dive with intent, aimed at something deep in the sea.

I’m about to depart. I will try to pull the circle up from below, bringing the end to meet the beginning. I wish the line were a smooth meridian, a perfect, taut hoop, but our course was distorted by necessity: the indifferent distribution of islands and airfields, the plane’s need for fuel.

I don’t regret anything, but I will if I let myself. I can think only about the plane, the wind, and the shore, so far away, where land begins again. The weather is improving. We’ve fixed the leak as best we can. I will go soon. I hate the never-ending day. The sun circles me like a vulture. I want a respite of stars.

Circles are wondrous because they are endless. Anything endless is wondrous. But endlessness is torture, too. I knew the horizon could never be caught but still chased it. What I have done is foolish; I had no choice but to do it.

[ Return to the review of “Great Circle.” ]

It isn’t how I thought it would be, now that the circle is almost closed, the beginning and end held apart by one last fearsome piece of water. I thought I would believe I’d seen the world, but there is too much of the world and too little of life. I thought I would believe I’d completed something, but now I doubt anything can be completed. I thought I would not be afraid. I thought I would become more than I am, but instead I know I am less than I thought.

No one should ever read this. My life is my one possession.

And yet, and yet, and yet.

Los Angeles December 2014

I only knew about Marian Graves because one of my uncle’s girlfriends liked to dump me at the library when I was a kid, and one time I picked up a random book called something like Brave Ladies of the Sky. My parents had gone up in a plane and never come back, and it turned out a decent percentage of the brave ladies had met the same fate. That got my attention. I think I might have been looking for someone to tell me a plane crash wasn’t such a bad way to go—though if anyone actually ever had, I would have thought they were full of shit. Marian’s chapter said she’d been raised by her uncle, and when I read that, I got goose bumps because I was being raised (kind of) by my uncle.

A nice librarian dug up Marian’s book for me—The Sea, the Sky, etc.—and I pored over it like an astrologist consulting a star chart, hopeful that Marian’s life would somehow explain my own, tell me what to do and how to be. Most of what she wrote went over my head, though I did come away with a vague aspiration to turn my loneliness into adventure. On the first page of my diary, I wrote “I WAS BORN TO BE A WANDERER” in big block letters. Then I didn’t write anything else because how do you follow that up when you’re ten years old and spend all your time either at your uncle’s house in Van Nuys or auditioning for television commercials? After I returned the book, I pretty much forgot about Marian. Almost all of the brave ladies of the sky are forgotten, really. There was the occasional spooky TV special about Marian in the ’80s, and a handful of die-hard Marian enthusiasts are still out there spinning theories on the internet, but she didn’t stick the way Amelia Earhart did. People at least think they know about Amelia Earhart, even though they don’t. It’s not really possible.

The fact that I got ditched at the library so often turned out to be a good thing because while other kids were at school, I was sitting in a succession of folding chairs in a succession of hallways at every casting call in the greater Los Angeles area for little white girls (or little race-unspecified girls, which also means white), chaperoned by a succession of nannies and girlfriends of my uncle Mitch, two categories that sometimes overlapped. I think the girlfriends sometimes offered to take care of me because they wanted him to see them as maternal, which they thought would make them seem like wife material, but that wasn’t actually a great strategy for keeping the flame alive with ol’ Mitch.

When I was two, my parents’ Cessna, which my dad was flying, crashed into Lake Superior. Or that’s the assumption. No trace was ever found. They were on their way to a romantic getaway at some friend’s middle-of-nowhere backwoods cabin to, as Mitch put it, reconnect. Even when I was little, he told me that my mother wouldn’t quit fucking around. His words. I’m not sure Mitch believed in childhood. “But they wouldn’t quit each other, either,” he’d say. Mitch definitely believed in taglines. He’d started out directing cheesy TV movies with titles like Love Takes a Toll (that was about a toll collector) and Murder for Valentine’s Day (take a wild guess).

My parents had left me with a neighbor in Chicago, but their last will and testament left me to Mitch. There wasn’t really anyone else. No other aunts or uncles, and my grandparents were a combination of dead, estranged, absent, and untrustworthy. Mitch wasn’t a bad guy, but his instincts were of the opportunistic, Hollywoodian variety, so after he’d had me a few months, he called in a favor to get me cast in an applesauce commercial. Then he found my agent, Siobhan, and I got consistent-enough work in commercials and guest spots and TV movies (I played the daughter in Murder for Valentine’s Day) that I can’t remember a time I wasn’t acting or trying to. It seemed like normal life: putting a plastic pony in a plastic stable over and over while cameras rolled and some grown-up stranger told you how to smile.

When I was eleven, after Mitch had stepping-stoned from movies of the week to music videos and was white-knuckle climbing into the indie film world, I got my proverbial big break: the role of Katie McGee in a time-travel cable sitcom for kids called The Big-Time Life of Katie McGee.

On set, my life was squeaky-clean and candy-colored, all puns and tidy plotlines and three-walled rooms under a hot sky of klieg lights. I hammed it up to a braying laugh track while wearing outfits so extravagantly trendy I looked like a manifestation of the tween zeitgeist. When I wasn’t working, I did pretty much whatever I wanted, thanks to my negligent uncle. In her book, Marian Graves wrote: As a child, my brother and I were largely left to our own devices. I believed—and no one told me otherwise for some years—that I was free to do as I liked, that I had the right to go any place I could find my way to. I was probably more of an impetuous little brat than Marian, but I felt the same way. The world was my oyster, and freedom was my mignonette. Life gives you lemons, you carve off their skins and garnish your martinis.

When I was thirteen, after the Katie McGee merch had started selling like crazy and after Mitch had directed Tourniquet and was rolling around in success like a pill-popping pig in shit, he moved us to Beverly Hills on our shared dime. Once I wasn’t stuck out in the Valley anymore, the kid who played Katie McGee’s big brother introduced me to his rich dirtbag high-schooler friends, and they drove me around and took me to parties and got in my pants. Mitch probably didn’t notice how much I was gone because he was usually out, too. Sometimes we’d bump into each other coming home at two or three in the morning, both messed up, and we’d just exchange nods like two people passing in a hotel corridor, attendees at the same rowdy conference.

But here’s a good thing: The on-set tutors for Katie McGee were decent, and they told me I should go to college, and since I liked the sound of that, I weaseled my way into NYU after the show ended, with substantial extra credit for being a B-list TV star. I was already packed and ready to move when Mitch overdosed, and if I hadn’t been, I probably would have just stayed in L.A. and partied myself to death, too.

Here’s something that might have been good or bad: After one semester, I got cast in the first Archangel movie. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if, instead, I’d finished college and stopped acting and been forgotten about, but it’s not like I possibly could have turned down the colossal amount of money that came with playing Katerina. So everything else is irrelevant.

In my blip of higher education, I had time to take Intro to Philosophy and learn about the panopticon, the hypothetical prison Jeremy Bentham came up with, where there would be one itty-bitty guardhouse at the center of a giant ring of cells. One guard was all you needed because he might be watching at any time, and the idea of being watched matters way more than actually being watched. Then Foucault turned the whole thing into a metaphor about how all you need to discipline and dominate a person or a population is to make them think it’s possible they’re being watched. You could tell the professor wanted us all to think the panopticon was scary and awful, but later, after Archangel made me way too famous, I wanted to take Katie McGee’s preposterous time machine back to that lecture hall and ask him to consider the opposite. Like instead of one guard in the middle, you’re in the middle, and thousands, maybe millions, of guards are watching you—or might be—all the time, no matter where you go.

Not that I would have had the nerve to ask a professor anything. At NYU everyone was always staring at me because I’d been Katie McGee, but it felt like they were staring at me because they knew I didn’t deserve to be there. And maybe I didn’t, but you can’t measure fairness in a lab. You can’t know if you deserve something. Probably you don’t. So it was a relief, too, when I quit school for Archangel, to go back to having a million obligations I had no choice about and a daily schedule I didn’t decide for myself. At college I’d flipped through the course catalog, as fat as a dictionary, in complete bafflement. I’d drifted through the cafeteria, looking at all the different foods, at the salad bars and the mountains of bagels and the bins of cereal and the soft-serve machine, and I’d felt like I was being asked to solve some monumental, life-or-death riddle.

After I’d wrecked everything and Sir Hugo Woolsey (the Sir Hugo, who happens to be my neighbor) started talking to me about some biopic he was producing and pulled Marian’s book from his tote bag—a book I hadn’t thought about in fifteen years—suddenly I was in a library again, looking at a slender hardback that might hold all the answers. Answers sounded nice. They sounded like something I wanted, not that I could ever quite unravel what I wanted. Not that I even really knew what wanting meant. I mostly experienced desire as a tangle of impossible, contradictory impulses. I wanted to vanish like Marian; I wanted to be more famous than ever; I wanted to say something important about courage and freedom; I wanted to be courageous and free, but I didn’t know what that meant—I only knew how to pretend to know, which I guess is acting.

Today is my last day of filming for Peregrine. I’m sitting in a mock-up of Marian’s plane that’s hanging from a pulley system and is about to be swung out over a giant tank of water and dropped. I’m wearing a reindeer-fur parka that weighs a thousand pounds and will weigh a million once it gets wet, and I’m trying not to let on that I’m afraid. Bart Olofsson, the director, took me aside earlier, asked if I really wanted to do this stunt myself, given, you know, what happened to my parents. I think I want to confront that, I said. I think I could use the closure. He’d put his hand on my shoulder, done his best guru face. You are a strong woman, he’d said.

Closure doesn’t really exist, though. That’s why we’re always looking for it.

The actor who’s playing Eddie Bloom, my navigator, is also wearing a reindeer-fur parka and has waterproof blood makeup on his forehead because he’s supposed to be knocked out by the impact. In real life, Eddie usually sat at a desk behind Marian’s seat, but the screenwriters, two aggressively cheerful brothers with Hitler Youth haircuts and Hitler Youth faces, thought it would be better if Eddie came up front for the death dive. Sure, fine, whatever.

The story we’re telling isn’t what really happened, anyway. I know that much. But I wouldn’t say I know the truth about Marian Graves. Only she knew.

Eight cameras will record my plunge: six fixed, two operated by divers. The plan is to do it once. Twice, at most. It’s an expensive shot, and our budget was never enormous and has now been exhausted and then some, but when you’ve come this far, the only way out is through. Best-case scenario, it takes all day. Worst-case scenario, I drown, wind up In Memoriam, wind up like my parents except in a fake plane and a fake ocean, not even trying to get anywhere.

“You’re sure you want to do this?”

The stunt coordinator is checking my harness, all business as he digs around my crotch, feeling for the straps and clips among bristly reindeer hair. True to type, he’s got a leathery face, a leathery wardrobe, and a stop-action way of walking from a few imperfect repair jobs.

“Totally,” I say.

When he’s done, the crane lifts us up, swings us out. There’s a scrim at the end of the tank that makes a kind of horizon with the water, and I’m her, Marian Graves, flying over the Southern Ocean with my fuel gauge on empty, and I know I can’t get anywhere other than where I am, which is nowhere. I wonder how cold the water will be, how long before I’m dead. I think through my options. I think about what I’ve promised myself. A gannet plunge.

“Action,” says a voice in my earpiece, and I push on the fake plane’s yoke as though I’m going to fly us down into the center of the earth. The pulleys tip the nose, and we dive.

GREAT CIRCLE By Maggie Shipstead 608 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $28.95. Copyright 2021 © by Maggie Shipstead Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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Great Circle: A Novel

  • By Maggie Shipstead
  • Reviewed by Clarissa Harwood
  • June 2, 2021

The soaring tale of a fictional female pilot who feels utterly real.

Great Circle: A Novel

Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle is a beautifully written, sprawling epic of a book about Marian Graves, a fictional female aviator who disappears in 1950 on the final leg of an attempted north-south circumnavigation of the earth.

The opening pages make for a vertiginous reading experience because of the many characters, settings, and time periods introduced in quick succession. Shipstead is willing to risk losing the reader from the outset, mimicking in narrative form the daring flying maneuvers Marian loves to perform.

But this novel richly rewards the reader willing to follow where it leads, and it soon becomes clear that the alternating omniscient and third-person-limited narration also mimics in narrative form the central theme of circular movement.

Marian is such a well-drawn, compelling character that the reader may be excused for believing she really existed. From the moment she sees a biplane for the first time as a child, becoming a pilot is her all-consuming passion. But the life of a female pilot in the early 20th century isn’t easy: She must combat strong familial and societal pressure in order to do what she loves.

Marian’s unique personality matches her unusual upbringing. She and her twin brother, Jamie, are raised by their dissolute but kindly Uncle Wallace after a disaster at sea takes away their parents. When Marian becomes an adolescent, Wallace tells Jamie that he’s worried she might end up “tough and alone, with a cigar stuck in her face…I already have trouble picturing her in a dress. Can you imagine Marian as a bride?”

When he asks Jamie to “have a word with her,” Jamie says simply, “She’d punch me,” and that’s the end of any plan to rein her in.

Marian continues to resist feminine stereotypes into adulthood. When she meets other women pilots, she is baffled by their decisions to perform their femininity, such as posing for newspaper photos in the cockpit while applying lipstick. When she joins Britain’s Air Transport Auxiliary, her recruiter explains:

“You must know they want the contrast, the magazine pictures of the pretty girl like any other, neat as a pin, hair curled, serving coffee and cake, who happens to be the same girl flying the big plane. You can’t have the pilot without the lady.”

Marian realizes that “the lipstick in the cockpit was an armoring, not an obeisance or a pandering affectation but something more like a beetle settling its wings down into a smooth shield.”

Though Marian’s story is an epic in itself — spanning the first half of the 20th century and many countries — there is also a modern timeline following the perspective of Hadley Baxter, a scandalously well-paid actress famous for her role in a glossy film series. She’s made some bad decisions that have tarnished her public image, and she’s bored with her life. Accepting the role of Marian Graves in a new biopic offers Hadley the chance to reinvent herself as a serious actress and maybe even win an Oscar. But as she becomes increasingly drawn into Marian’s life, her goals for her own start to change.

As with any dual-timeline novel, one timeline tends to be more compelling than the other. I found Marian’s story more gripping than Hadley’s. Marian is easier to root for, with her orphaned status, poverty, and big dreams. Hadley, on the other hand, seems at first like a typical self-absorbed poor little rich girl. And, initially, the timelines seem to have only the most tenuous connection, though by the end of the book, they come together in a satisfying way.

Shipstead also offers fascinating snippets of aviation history. She tells the stories of the usual suspects — Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart — but gives lesser-known pilots of the era such as Amy Johnson and Elinor Smith their due as well. Especially delightful is Jacqueline Cochran in a cameo role: She was a real-life record-setting pilot and a recruiter for the Air Transport Auxiliary.

Just as impressive as Shipstead’s mastery of aviation history is the way she inhabits Marian’s point of view. The sensory details of flying in Marian’s planes are so vivid that, after closing the book, I half believed I’d flown in them myself, despite my fear of flying. The beauty of Antarctica’s landscape is just as immediate:

“Antarctica has a trickster’s spirit. In certain lights, a mountain a mile distant turns out to be a shoulder-high heap of snow fifty feet away. Dozens of tall, black figures marching toward them out of the fog turn out to be only five knee-high Adélie penguins, magnified and multiplied by some atmospheric illusion, stretched along an invisible horizon like an army.”

Despite my quibbles about the novel’s pacing and some of its narrative choices, readers of Great Circle are in good hands. If a book can be compared to a plane, nervous (or just uncertain) flyers should just sit back, relax, and enjoy where master pilot Maggie Shipstead takes them.

Clarissa Harwood is the author of two historical novels, Impossible Saints and Bear No Malice , published by Pegasus Books . She holds a Ph.D. in 19th-century British literature and lives in Ontario, Canada.

Support the Independent by purchasing this title via our affliate links: Amazon.com Powell's.com Or through Bookshop.org

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Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

  • Publication Date: April 5, 2022
  • Genres: Fiction , Historical Fiction
  • Paperback: 672 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage
  • ISBN-10: 1984897705
  • ISBN-13: 9781984897701
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  1. Booker Longlist 2021: Great Circle

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  3. Reading Check-In || Sister-in-Law Suggestions!

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COMMENTS

  1. Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead review

    Mon 14 Jun 2021 06.00 EDT. A great circle, Maggie Shipstead's third novel explains on the opening page, is "the largest circle that can be drawn on a sphere". The equator is one; so is every ...

  2. An Ambitious Novel Takes Flight

    By Maggie Shipstead. Within the first 60 pages of Maggie Shipstead's "Great Circle," there are two plane crashes, the beginning of a Hollywood rendition of a plane crash and a sunken ship ...

  3. Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

    Maggie Shipstead is the New York Times-bestselling author of the novels Astonish Me and Seating Arrangements, winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. A third novel, Great Circle, will be published in May 2021. She is a graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow ...

  4. 'Great Circle,' by Maggie Shipstead book review

    Maggie Shipstead's 'Great Circle' is a soaring work of historical fiction and a perfect summer novel. Review by Ron Charles. May 3, 2021 at 5:40 p.m. EDT. Maggie Shipstead may have been ...

  5. GREAT CIRCLE

    Ingeniously structured and so damn entertaining; this novel is as ambitious as its heroines—but it never falls from the sky. 81. Pub Date: May 4, 2021. ISBN: 978--525-65697-5. Page Count: 608. Publisher: Knopf. Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2020. Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021.

  6. Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead: Summary and reviews

    Book Summary. An unforgettable story of a daredevil female aviator determined to chart her own course in life, at any cost - Great Circle spans Prohibition-era Montana, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, New Zealand, wartime London, and modern-day Los Angeles. After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie ...

  7. Review: Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

    1.7K. Great Circle was not what I expected, but I did end up liking it! Read on for my full review and find out what I didn't expect. The Synopsis. Spanning Prohibition-era Montana, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, New Zealand, wartime London, and modern-day Los Angeles, Great Circle tells the unforgettable story of a daredevil female aviator determined to chart her own course in life, at any ...

  8. Great Circle review: Maggie Shipstead puts feminist spin on old

    Marian Graves, the swashbuckling heroine of Great Circle, Maggie Shipstead's sprawling new doorstop of a novel, is "an odd, tall, dusty, freckled girl" for whom gender fluidity is a gift, used ...

  9. 'Great Circle' Review: Soaring Storylines Brought Down to Earth With

    Maggie Shipstead's upcoming novel "Great Circle'' is unbelievably expansive both in setting and scope. Set to be released in May 2021 the book combines interwoven narratives circulating around ...

  10. Maggie Shipstead's 'Great Circle' is a Literary Escape: Review

    The Best Books of May 2021; Our Favorite Books of 2021; Oprah and Jenna Bush Hager Talk Book Clubs; Maggie Shipstead's sumptuous epic, Great Circle (Knopf, May 4) is the one. I brought it with me to Key West on my first vacation since the Covid lockdown began in March 2020, along with about eight other options—just in case.

  11. The True Story Behind Maggie Shipstead's 'Great Circle'

    In award-winning author Maggie Shipstead's new novel, all of those analogies are made literal. Great Circle's 600 pages span a full century and the entire planet. The book tells the story of ...

  12. Interview: Maggie Shipstead, Author Of 'Great Circle' : NPR

    Knopf. Maggie Shipstead's new Great Circle is one of the most anticipated novels of the spring. At a time when so many of us have been cooped up, her novel ranges around the world in over a ...

  13. Review: Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

    Similar in tone and feel to novels like Sarah Blake's The Guest Book and Erika Swyler's The Book of Speculation, Great Circle is sweeping in scope and does well in capturing and conveying a strong feeling of time and place. Shipstead's writing is well-honed and fluid throughout. She creates beautiful subtleties with the images and ...

  14. Review of Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

    Published 2023. About this book. More by this author. From the Booker Prize nominee and New York Times bestselling author of Great Circle, a piercing, irresistible first collection of short stories exquisite in their craft and audacious in their range. We have 9 read-alikes for Great Circle, but non-members are limited to two results.

  15. Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead: 9781984897701

    In that, Great Circle is consistently, often breathtakingly, sound." —Lynn Steger Strong, The New York Times Book Review "Shipstead's eye for detail, character and the moments that tell all make this a true literary achievement." —Zibby Owens, Good Morning America

  16. "Great Circle," by Maggie Shipstead: An Excerpt

    When he's done, the crane lifts us up, swings us out. There's a scrim at the end of the tank that makes a kind of horizon with the water, and I'm her, Marian Graves, flying over the Southern ...

  17. Great Circle: A Novel

    Maggie Shipstead's Great Circle is a beautifully written, sprawling epic of a book about Marian Graves, a fictional female aviator who disappears in 1950 on the final leg of an attempted north-south circumnavigation of the earth. The opening pages make for a vertiginous reading experience because of the many characters, settings, and time ...

  18. Book Marks reviews of Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

    Rave Stuart Miller, With Great Circle, it's time to rewrite the book on Maggie Shipstead. Her writing still soars and dips with dizzying flair, but this time the dazzling prose is in the service of an expansive story that covers more than a century and seems to encapsulate the whole wide world. With detailed brilliance, she lavishes heart and ...

  19. Book Review: Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

    Cover Description. Spanning Prohibition-era Montana, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, New Zealand, wartime London, and modern-day Los Angeles, Great Circle tells the unforgettable story of a daredevil female aviator determined to chart her own course in life, at any cost. After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute ...

  20. Great Circle (novel)

    Great Circle is a 2021 novel by American writer Maggie Shipstead, published on May 4, 2021, by Alfred A. Knopf. ... Kirkus Reviews, in its starred review, wrote that "Shipstead reveals breathtaking range and skill, expertly juggling a multigenerational historical epic and a scandal-soaked Hollywood satire." Kirkus also commented that "her ...

  21. Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

    Author interviews, book reviews and lively book commentary are found here. Content includes books from bestselling, midlist and debut authors. The Book Report Network. Our Other Sites. ... Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead. Publication Date: April 5, 2022; Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction; Paperback: 672 pages; Publisher: Vintage; ISBN-10: ...

  22. Books by Maggie Shipstead (Author of Great Circle)

    Maggie Shipstead's most popular book is Great Circle. Maggie Shipstead has 17 books on Goodreads with 344074 ratings. Maggie Shipstead's most popular book is Great Circle. ... Maggie Shipstead Average rating 3.81 · 113,000 ratings · 14,364 reviews · shelved 344,074 times Showing 17 distinct works. sort ...