Maggie Shipstead

"Great Circle is a masterpiece...one of the best books I've ever read" --J. Courtney Sullivan A breathtaking epic... This is a stunning feat. --Publishers Weekly #1 IndieNext Pick *A Most Anticipated Book of 2021 according to O, The Oprah Magazine; Lit Hub; She Reads; Town & Country; Esquire; and Bustle* 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 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.

Great Circle

Angela

"One thing I've learned is that you don't just love a person, you love a vision of your life with them. And then you have to mourn both."

Lizzy Jensen

"You could have just told me you were married." Ruth said. "You're not so special that everything has to be a secret." 

Ruth let out a derisive snort. "You do so. And that's why you know you can drop people, and they'll still come back. You were right, too. I came crawling as soon as you snapped your fingers." 

I was still trying to escape my feelings for Alexei, my guilt about Oliver, hoping Redwood would turn out to be the key that freed me. Maybe he was hoping I was something equally improbable. We think each new romantic prospect, each new lover, is a fresh start, but really we're just tacking into the wind, each new trajectory determined by the last, plotting a jagged yet unbroken line of reactions through our lives. That was part of the problem: I was always just reacting, always just geting buffeted along, never setting a destination.

One thing I learned is that you don't just love a person, you love a vision of your life with them. And then you have to mourn both. 

Looking at Jamie was like seeing a vision of herself as a man, full of certainty that things could be set right, full of faith that new possibilitis would always arise. "There's no other way" she said. “Believe me." 

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

"That's what I mean. Things might be better without anyone to worry about. He leans forward, his folded arms sliding on the table. "That's not true. That would be the most terrible loneliness."

Elli

A 'most anticipated' read of 2021 in Guardian, Independent and New Statesman 'Shipstead's breathtaking epic of a female aviator is a stunning feat' PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY ________________________ I WAS BORN TO BE A WANDERER From the night she is rescued as a baby out of the flames of a sinking ship; to the day she joins a pair of daredevil pilots looping and diving over the rugged forests of her childhood, to the thrill of flying Spitfires during the war, the life of Marian Graves has always been marked by a lust for freedom and danger. In 1950, she embarks on the great circle flight, circumnavigating the globe. It is Marian's life dream and her final journey, before she disappears without a trace. Half a century later, Hadley Baxter, a brilliant, troubled Hollywood starlet is irresistibly drawn to play Marian Graves, a role that will lead her to probe the deepest mysteries of the vanished pilot's life. An enthralling journey over oceans and continents and a drama of exhilarating power, GREAT CIRCLE is perfect for book clubs and fans of William Boyd and Donna Tartt. _________________________________________ Praise for Maggie Shipstead, winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and LA Times First Fiction Prize 'Outrageously gifted' RICHARD RUSSO 'Ferociously clever' GUARDIAN ''Graceful and dazzling' MARIA SEMPLE 'Joyously good' DAILY MAIL 'Impressive' JEFFREY EUGENIDES Early readers love GREAT CIRCLE: 'Beautifully crafted characters' NetGalley Reviewer 'I was completely absorbed by it' NetGalley Reviewer 'The best book I've read in a long time' NetGalley Reviewer

The dazzling new novel for fans of The Goldfinch

Objectively a good book, but not for me. I didn't like 1 of the 2 povs for most of the book, and i felt like it took too long to really connect, so i found myself dreading coming back to this. 

Stas

Was in the mood for a longer book I could get lost in. This hit the spot. Didn't love it as much as I'd hoped, but it was still a good one. 

A really unusual book which I enjoyed a lot - the intensity of Marion’s experience, her relationship with her brother and of course how she felt about flying. It was fascinating, though I a bit too long, I also felt the present day storyline didn’t add very much. I mostly enjoyed getting lost in Marion’s skies. 

Laura Gill

Another one I kind of enjoyed against my will!

Sarah Christine Gill

faye

enjoyed it but the whole plane/world/circle/runaway metaphor got kinda tiring after a while, felt like it coulda been less pages but ayo we move

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. 'Outrageously gifted' RICHARD RUSSO 'Ferociously clever' GUARDIAN 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 ARRANGMENTS.With GREAT CIRCLE, she cements her place among a famed list of American Literary Stars as one of the greatest storytellers of our time.

Kristen Claiborn

I had such a hard time getting into this book. There were a few times I almost gave up and threw it in the DNF bucket, but I powered through, only because it's going to be one of the buzz books from 2021. All the "famous" book club books are. The first third of this book kind of felt like it rambled on aimlessly, which frustrated me. Eventually I found the story more interesting and decided I wanted to see how it ended, but I didn't really "care" in the way that I have felt towards so many other books. I wasn't invested in these characters, even though Marian was truly a fascinating character. This one just wasn't for me.

Jessica Ford

Cheri McElroy

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

This book is a sweeping epic of a fictional aviator, Marian Graves, and the actress who portrays her in a movie. The scope covers decades, continents, tragedies and triumphs. It was fantastic.

Ethan Hill

This made me feel a lot of emotions, and there's no doubt that Shipstead created multiple fully formed characters, but there were multiple periods that shuffled along and could have been tightened.

Marloes

Wow, this book is ambitious and comprehensive. But Shipstead did the job. The writing is astounding - I almost envy her for being able to deliver a book like this - the storytelling is layered, clean and visually beautiful. All those details, a character's full life span, the historical research and so many interesting side plots... This reads like a magnum opus.

This is a book though that you need to be in the right headspace for, with enough time to fully digest and appreciate. It took me around 150 pages to be fully dedicated, even though it was greatly written from the start, and another 100 pages until I couldn't stop reading. 

A book I won't forget.

Fraser Simons

I liked a lot of the themes worked into this. The narrative jumps, though sometimes uneven, facilitated a lot of satisfying correlations between past and present. The nature of stories and what they can, potentially, do. Who has agency and why. While the idea that you are required to violate aspects of your identity to participate in the rat race is not new but does feel like one of the keenest things this works to convey. 

For the most part, this did meet my expectations. It did not exceed them though, for several reasons.

The narration was not great, possessing a cadence I did not like. I am not positive whether this is a byproduct of the prose or the delivery or a sort of perfect storm on that front. I didn't quite care about any of the characters and was more interested in the meta-story, which was what became the only satisfying part of the book for me because the granular plot beats, for the most part, felt overwritten. I did not consider the time investment to be significantly returned but was still a worthwhile story to consume, overall. 

It might not have benefited from coming after some phenomenal reads as well. I would consider re-reading it sometime with a physical product because I really do think a lot of the annoyance of this came from the narration. And it may simply be stylistically more geared toward not being read aloud as well. Who knows.

Emma Jacqueline

I loved so much of this that what I didn't love was especially glaring. The entire present-day Hollywood plot felt extraneous and tonally mismatched with Marian's story. Los Angeles is a difficult setting to get right without the characters and circumstances coming off as satiric and every time Shipstead circled back to Hadley's story, I was never sure what she wanted me to feel about Hadley, or her romantic entanglements, or the people surrounding her. I believe the Marian biopic and Hadley's struggles with global fame were supposed to feed into the idea of how you can never fully know a person. Much like Jamie Graves constantly try to capture the vastness of a landscape in his paintings, it'll never be truly possible for anyone to see the whole of anyone else. I love that theme as it's shown in Marian and Jamie's stories; it felt lazy in Hadley's. Overall though, I was blown away by the epic feel of Great Circle and by Shipstead's prose. I'll definitely pick up whatever she writes next.

Imie Kent-Muller

Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch meets Taylor Jenkins Reid The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. A bit slow at points but worth every minute of reading. Stunning.

Harriet Moar-Smith

This book certainly felt like a journey. At halfway through I wasn't sure I liked it. Now I've finished it I'm still not sure I liked it but it was an excellent read that will stick with me.

I think it could have been a little tighter, I wasn't a fan of the dual timelines until the very end. It would have been a 2 star if it wasn't for the ending, where I do think the author was pretty clever.

Beautiful writing. The characters felt so real and nuanced and the story so well crafted that I kept forgetting I was reading a novel and not non-fiction. It has some really intense and hard to read moments and deals with some intense some intense subject matter (see CWs). There were a few moments when I needed to take a break because of some really emotionally tough scenes. But nothing felt gratuitous or salacious. I don't even know what more to say, I just loved it. 

Content Warnings

abuse, Grief, Sexual assault, War, Rape, Child abuse, Alcoholism, death of parent, Transphobia

Nico J

Hands down the best book I've read this year - sweeping epic, moving narrative, specked with detail and introspection for different characters in poignant places. Stellar.

Great Circle

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