Great Circle

Already tipped as ‘truly exceptional’ and ‘near-flawless’ by The Bookseller, and a ‘breath taking epic’ by Publishers Weekly, GREAT CIRCLE is the anticipated follow up to Maggie Shipstead’s NY Times bestselling and award winning novel, SEATING ARRANGEMENTS. It is a powerful story following the life of a fearless female aviator in Prohibition America, alongside the Hollywood actor who will play her on screen many years later, reminiscent of Donna Tartt’s THE GOLDFINCH and Ann Patchett’s THE DUTCH HOUSE, with shades of William Boyd too. This is a book about rebelling against the stereotypical pressures that women face, with an inspirational message to be bold and courageous.
THE STORY OF TWO VASTLY DIFFERENT WOMEN – A DAREDEVIL AVIATOR AND A DISGRACED HOLLYWOOD STAR – WHOSE FATES COLLIDE ACROSS
COUNTRIES AND CENTURIES
I was born to be a wanderer. I was shaped to the earth like a seabird to a wave.
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, the life of Marian Graves has always been marked by a lust for freedom and danger.
In 1950, she embarks on a Great Circle flight, circumnavigating the globe. It is Marian’s life dream and her final journey. She crash lands in to the Antarctic ice and is never seen again.
Half a century later, Hadley Baxter, a troubled star beset by scandal, is irresistibly drawn to play Marian Graves in her biopic, a role that will lead her to probe the deepest mysteries of the vanished pilot’s life.
GREAT CIRCLE is an enthralling drama of struggle and submission,and of lives lived on the edge: two defiant women in search of an undefinable freedom, whatever the cost. Shipstead has delivered an epic of extraordinary depth and beauty that marks her as one of the greatest storytellers of our time.

A NOTE FROM MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD ABOUT THE INSPIRATION FOR GREAT CIRCLE:
“I happened to see a statue of aviatrix Jean Batten at the Auckland airport just after a writing project had abruptly died on me, and some strange, deep instinct told me decisively that my next book should be about a pilot. The process of translating that initial spark into a long, multi-pronged novel took years and of course tapped into other sources of inspiration: my life in Los Angeles, my travels to the polar regions, two months I spent on a mountainside in Montana, lots and lots of research. I always think of a book as something that has to be built, and for this one I brought in bits and pieces from literally all over the world and spackled them together. As I wrote, I found I kept returning to ideas of scale and freedom and to questions of how each of us decides to live our one life. In the end, of course, I was left with more questions than answers, but that’s writing.”