The other main character is Hadley, a modern-day movie star cast to play Marian in a film, who learns more about her than anyone else.

We follow her from childhood and all the way through her life. Marian’s story is probably 75% of the book, if I had to guess.

First is Marian Graves, born in 1914, who becomes one of the rare woman pilots of her time and eventually (don’t worry, this is not a spoiler) disappears trying to circumnavigate the globe. And I think, perhaps, they might be right! At least so far.

A friend who read through the whole longlist earlier this year told me they thought it might turn out to be my favorite of them all. Great Circle officially landed on my TBR because it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. 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. 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. 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. 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.Ī century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on Marian's disappearance in Antarctica. There-after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes-Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. 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.Īfter being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana.

Book review great circle