Mapping the lives of a fearless female aviator and an actor who portrays her on screen decades later, Great Circle is an expansive tale of passion and ambition from the author of the award-winning Seating Arrangements.
Waterstones Fiction Book of the Month for June 2022
Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2022
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2021
For fans of The Goldfinch, All the Light We Cannot See and The Girls: this monumentally powerful epic weaves together the astonishing lives of a daredevil female aviator and the Hollywood rebel who will play her on screen.
From the days of giant passenger ships sliding past Arctic icebergs, to the daring pilots of WWII, to present-day Hollywood and its malcontents, at the core of this story is the indomitable Marian Graves and her twin brother Jamie who are twice abandoned by their parents. Marian and Jamie grow up roaming Montana forests, more comfortable with landscape than with people.
When a pair of aerobats take their exhilarating show to a nearby airfield, Marian's life is changed forever. Watching them roll, dive, and loop in their mini plane, she can think of nothing else but flying. As she grows into a woman, she sacrifices everything to command the breathtaking sense of freedom, of utter control over her own fate, that she feels when in the air. She becomes one of the most fearless pilots of her time, and in 1949 she sets out to do what no one has done before: fly the Great Circle around the earth, north to south around the poles. Shortly before completing the journey, her plane disappears, lost to history.
In 2015, Hadley Baxter, former child star and poster girl of the blockbuster Archangel franchise, has just been fired for cheating on her on-screen boyfriend. Struggling to escape the fury of the fans, she grasps at an offer for the comeback role of a lifetime: to play the famed female pilot Marian Graves in a biopic. From the first pages of the script, she feels an instant connection with Marian, a woman who refused to be bound by gravity or any of the other strictures of her time. After filming is complete, her bond grows stronger as she begins to question whether the Great Marian Graves really did die at all.
Maggie Shipstead is the author of the bestselling and prize-winning debut novel Seating Arrangements. With Great Circle, she cements her place among a famed list of American Literary Stars as one of the greatest storytellers of our time.
Publisher: Transworld Publishers Ltd
ISBN: 9781529176643
Number of pages: 688
Weight: 468 g
Dimensions: 197 x 130 x 31 mm
Luminous, masterful ... glides seamlessly through the 20th century immersing the reader. Tremendously well-written - TELEGRAPH, 'Best Fiction of 2021'
A gripping historical adventure that feels sharp, fresh and modern - STYLIST MAGAZINE
Shipstead turns phrases and observes people beautifully. Full of adventure, passion and tragedy... a glorious tribute to women who push the boundaries of their one, brief life, breaking the bonds of their place in history and their female bodies, to soar higher and faster than others; and the price they pay to live so fast - THE TIMES, 'Best Fiction of 2021'
Impressive and gripping - SUNDAY TIMES
What's so impressive is how deeply we 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. GREAT CIRCLE grasps for and ultimately reaches something extraordinary - NEW YORK TIMES
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
GREAT CIRCLE is a novel of our insatiable need to stare down the terrible, magnificent vastness of it all: love, war, desire, fear ... A sweeping, swashbuckling book, full of oversaturated colour and grand destiny. The joy of this dynamic, soaring novel is not a welcome extra but its very engine - TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
Encompasses flight, travel adventure, identity, sexuality, family, the celebrity age - and in such beautiful writing. A masterpiece. - NIGELLA LAWSON
Rocked by the cool cadences of Shipstead's prose, readers will embark on a journey through time and space. Across 600 pages, they'll link arms with its characters as they stroll along the decks of early-1900s ocean liners, then board private jets to eavesdrop on the poolside parties of 21st-century Hollywood. They'll spot eagles arcing over the wild frontiers of Prohibition-era America then feel the lonely, existential chill of the white expanses of Antarctica - in between city breaks in Europe and Australia - INDEPENDENT
This wonderful novel weaves together the story of two women: a female aviator who goes missing in the1950s and the Hollywood star playing her in a film in the present day. A commitment that rewards with memorable characters and vivid storytelling - GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, 'Best Fiction of 2021'
From near-death experience in childhood, to marriage to a bootlegger, Marian rockets off the page in this gripping novel. A staggering story - SUNDAY TELEGRAPH MAGAZINE
Accomplished and ambitious... 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 world she creates. - FINANCIAL TIMES
A clever, poignant story about ambition, love and sacrifice that'll completely draw you in - COSMOPOLITAN MAGAZINE
This ambitious, wide-ranging and psychologically insightful novel is a tour-de-force - DAILY EXPRESS
It is rare to read a novel that is as beautifully built as it is elegantly written. Moving and surprising at every turn - GUARDIAN
A gorgeous soaring story that takes flight from the very first page - SUNDAY EXPRESS
Vast and entrancing - BA HIGH LIFE
A riveting novel with powerful characters that will excite, shock and enthral - PSYCHOLOGIES MAGAZINE
Nothing short of brilliant - OPRAH DAILY
A work of epic proportions and rich, cinematic detail - FINANCIAL TIMES, BEST OF SUMMER BOOKS
Grand, audacious and completely engrossing - DAILY MIRROR
This epic novel tops 600 pages but you'll still want more. Ambitious, cannily constructed and entertaining - MAIL ON SUNDAY
Beautifully written and endlessly readable, this rapturous novel soars - GUARDIAN
Ambitious, intricately detailed, rich and considered - INDEPENDENT
A WOMAN'S WEEKLY BOOK CLUB READ - MY WEEKLY
Daringly ambitious... a novel that invites the reader to immerse themselves in the sweep of history, the rich and detailed research... breathtaking - OBSERVER
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 MAGAZINE
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
Mesmerizing - TATLER
An enthralling epic about aviation and adventure. A big, baggy blast of a book bulging with sex and drugs, taking in Prohibition-era Montana, wartime London, present-day Hollywood, painting and physics. I loved it - REBECCA JONES, BBC ARTS CORRESPONDENT
A generous, escapist treat - i-PAPER, 30 BEST BOOKS FOR SUMMER
A soaring epic of female adventure and wanderlust - GUARDIAN
Bestselling novelist Maggie Shipstead was struggling to depict a female adventurer. So she became one. The stakes of GREAT CIRCLE are high-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 - L A TIMES
Relentlessly exciting . . . My top recommendation for this summer. Shipstead's sweeping new female-centered epic intertwines the story of Marian, an aviator who wants to circumnavigate the globe with that of actor Hadley Baxter, cast a century later to play Marian in a film. What can Marian's life tell Hadley about her own? - WASHINGTON POST
Dazzling prose 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 empathy on every character. She never wavers, pulls out a twist or two that feel fully earned, and then sticks the landing - BOSTON GLOBE
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 - MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE
Enthralling. Moving and surprising at every turn - GUARDIAN
Sweepingly panoramic and immersive. An audacious epic - DAILY MAIL, 'Best Fiction of 2021'
In a moment when our quarantined worlds have become so small, GREAT CIRCLE offers more than just wanderlust; it feels like a liberation. - ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
Maggie Shipstead combines cinematic scope with a poet's eye for detail - THE TIMES
The beginning of Maggie Shipstead's astounding novel, a Booker finalist, includes a series of endings: two plane crashes, a sunken ship and several people dead. The bad luck continues when one of the ship's young survivors, Marian, grows up to become a pilot-only to disappear on the job. Shipstead unravels parallel narratives, Marian's and that of another woman whose life is changed by Marian's story, in glorious detail. Every character, whether mentioned once or 50 times, has a specific, necessary presence. It's a narrative made to be devoured, one that is both timeless and satisfying. - TIME, BOOK OF THE YEAR
Absolutely dazzling - NEWSWEEK
Thrilling - DAILY MAIL
GREAT CIRCLE flew us to a different world. A book to devour - TELEGRAPH, BOOK OF THE YEAR
A sweeping saga that alternates between the life of a tenacious female aviator in the 1930s and that of a millennial film star cast to play her in a biopic. In death, 'each of us destroys the world,' the author observes - but her engrossing novel is a moving reflection on the will to survive - THE ECONOMIST
Artfully constructed and exhuberantly entertaining - THE MAIL, BOOK OF THE YEAR
Shipstead soars in this expansive, beautiful novel about women and flight - THE STRAITS TIMES
Engrossing, ambitious, beautifully written - DAILY EXPESS, Summer Reading
Completely engrossing from the very first page. You won't be able to put this down - HELLO MAGAZINE
A brilliant saga of a book. It will absolutely captivate you - JANE GARVEY, Fortunately Podcast
“ Sitting Arrangement “ is one of my favourite books of all time. It has been seven years since then and I must say “ Great Circle” is definitely worth the wait.
The story has two main characters and two time lines....
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This book covers the life of Marion, rescued as a baby off a sinking ship, to her role in WW2 and then to her attempt to circumnavigate the world by air over the poles. The characters fell a bit flat for me and I am... More
I really wanted to like this book. It's set in a period I really like, of early aviation , with a focus on all those magnificent women in their flying machines. I don't care about aeroplanes, but I love... More
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