Great Circle

There is another cover version available with ISBN 9780525656975.

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.

In Missoula, Montana, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle after their 1914 rescue as newborns from a sinking ocean ship. Marian falls in love with flying there, after meeting two barnstorming pilots who are travelling through town in dilapidated biplanes. When she is fourteen, she abandons school and meets a wealthy bootlegger who provides her with a plane and subsidises her lessons. This arrangement will haunt her for the rest of her life, even though it enables her to fulfil her destiny of flying over the North and South Poles to circumnavigate the globe.

A hundred years after Marian's abduction in Antarctica, Hadley Baxter is chosen to portray Marian in a movie. Bright, shrewd, and repulsed by Hollywood's claustrophobia, Hadley is ready to reinvent herself after becoming a cult fame due to a love movie series. Her absorption into Marian's persona exhilaratingly unfurls alongside Marian's narrative, as the two women's destinies—as well as their need for autonomy in radically different eras and places—intersect. Great Circle is a colossal work of art and a huge step forward for the very talented Maggie Shipstead. It is epic and dramatic, painstakingly researched and wonderfully conveyed.