Great Circle
By Maggie Shipstead
- Genre
- Literary Fiction
- Publisher
- Alfred A. Knopf
- Publication year
- 2021
- ISBN
- 9780525656975
Great Circle interweaves two stories: Marian Graves, a daring aviator who vanishes in 1950 attempting to fly the globe from pole to pole, and Hadley Baxter, a contemporary Hollywood actress cast to play her. Maggie Shipstead's novel spans a century and several continents, tracing ambition...
Two women, a century apart, orbit the same obsession in Maggie Shipstead's sweeping third novel. 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. It is expansive, adventurous and, for all its distances, intimate about the price of a life spent chasing the horizon.