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INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER
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 - Great Circle "soars and dips with dizzying flair...an expansive story that covers more than a century and seems to encapsulate the whole wide world" (Boston Globe).
"A masterpiece.... One of the best books I’ve ever read." (J. Courtney Sullivan)
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 14, 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.
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<spoiler> "Until she dies, she will wonder if she could have persuaded him to come with her. Until she dies, she will remember Eddie's small, dark figure on the ice, waving to her with both arms as she circles up. She will always be afraid that his valedictory gesture might have changed, at some moment when she was too far away to notice, into a plea for her to return.""She supposes there will be nothing. She supposes each of us destroys the world. We close our eyes and snuff out all that has existed, all that will ever be. But if she could choose, she would ask for a lift. She would want to rise from her body and have it be like when she'd first gone up with Trout, as though she were being held aloft by pure possibility, as though she were about to see everything." </spoiler>This book is a combination of all of my favourite books (Milkman, Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, East of Eden) while still managing to be its own distinct entity.