Great Circle

Marian Graves flies planes in an age that barely tolerates the ambition; Hadley Baxter, decades later, plays her on screen and finds the role unsettling her own life. Shipstead moves between them with unusual assurance, building a double portrait of women who refuse the scripts written for them.

The pleasures here are old-fashioned in the best sense: landscape, danger, forward momentum, a cast that stretches from Prohibition-era Montana to wartime Britain to the Antarctic ice. Yet the novel is also quietly interested in how stories get told and sold, how a life becomes a legend and then a film. For readers who want scope without sacrificing intelligence, it delivers a genuine epic, researched with evident care and paced to keep the pages turning.