Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
Fletcher Agency
Melissa Chinchillo
Original language
English
Categories

GREAT CIRCLE

Maggie Shipstead

An enthralling journey over oceans and continents and a drama of exhilarating power, GREAT CIRCLE combines an unforgettable cast with thrilling suspense in a heart-stopping story of loss and obsession, sacrifice and survival, of the unknowable mysteries of freedom, love and life itself.

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, to the thrill of flying Spitfires during the war, the life of Marian Graves has always been marked by a lust for freedom and danger.

In 1950, she embarks on her life's dream - to fly a Great Circle around the globe. But after a crash landing she finds herself stranded on the Antarctic ice without enough fuel. With a fearsome piece of water separating her from completion of the Circle, she writes one last entry in her logbook. She is ready for her final journey.

Half a century later, Hadley Baxter, a brilliant, troubled Hollywood starlet is irresistibly drawn to play Marian Graves, a role that will lead her to probe the deepest mysteries of the vanished pilot's life.


About the Author:

Maggie Shipstead’s debut novel Seating Arrangements was a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and L A Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, Conde Nast Traveller, The Best American Short Stories and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford and a two- time National Magazine Award finalist for fiction. Her second novel is the critically acclaimed Astonish Me. Maggie Shipstead grew up in California and lives in Los Angeles, California.

Available products
Book

Published 2021-05-01 by Transworld (UK)

Comments

She Reads book club pick

Town and Country - 42 Must-Read Books for Spring

ASTONISH ME

UK / Blue Door

French / Belfond

German / DTV

Portuguese / Jacaranda

Lithuanian / Sofoklis

Italian / Rizzoli

Turkish / Sola

Dutch / De Bezige Bij

Polish / Znak


SEATING ARRANGEMENTS

UK / Blue Door

French / Belfdond

German / DTV

Brazil Portuguese / Record

Turkish / Sola

Italian / Neri Pozza

Polish / Znak


Read more...





Read more...

"Shipstead (Seating Arrangements) returns with a breathtaking epic of a female aviator... manages to portray both Marian’s and Hadley’s expanded sense of consciousness as they push the boundaries inscribed around them—Marian’s through flight and Hadley’s through creative inspiration (a particularly colorful scene has her zooming on psychedelic mushrooms). This is a stunning feat."(May)


Read more...

 

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/openbook/article/85006-maggie-shipstead-s-novel-gone-round-the-world.html

 

https://www.oprahmag.com/entertainment/g34897586/best-historical-fiction-novels-2021/?slide=27

 

https://www.oprahmag.com/entertainment/books/g34772945/best-books-2021/

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/01/style/modern-love-my-five-week-long-first-date.html


Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2021

‘Ferociously clever' -The Guardian

‘a fully immersive experience…so damn entertaining’ -Kirkus [starred review]

'Distinctive and dazzling' -Richard Russo

Cassandra Campbell and Alex McKenna's captivating performances of Maggie Shipstead's new novel will divert you from everything else as you follow two women on different quests in separate eras. Marion, in the early twentieth century, devotes her life to flying; years later, Hadley navigates Hollywood's pitfalls as she prepares to play Marion on-screen. Campbell, who narrates most of the book, delivers Shipstead's stunning descriptive prose with a precision that crystalizes its edges, making it sound timeless. Her character portrayals are movingly delivered, vividly evoking personality with subtle shifts in pitch, rhythm, and affect. McKenna's poignant depiction of Hadley, in a chipper yet throaty voice that hints of late nights, perfectly combines the character's endearing mix of enthusiasm, naïveté, and sangfroid. Together, they transfix.

Shipstead (Seating Arrangements) returns with a breathtaking epic of a female aviator. In 1914, infant twins Marian and Jamie Graves are sent to their dissolute uncle in Montana after their mother dies. There, a married pair of barnstormers inspires 12-year-old Marian, who feels “only lightness” as a passenger during a roll, loop, and nosedive. As a teen trucking hootch during Prohibition, Marian makes a delivery to a brothel, where she meets bootlegger Barclay Macqueen, who sponsors her interest in flying. Later Barclay traps her in a disastrous marriage, and she flees to become a bush pilot in Alaska. Her subsequent exploits are thrillingly and perceptively chronicled: during WWII, she ferries Spitfires for the RAF, and in 1949 embarks on a fateful pole-to-pole circumnavigation of the globe, which leads to a crash in Antarctica, after which she is assumed to have died. Shipstead interweaves stories of Jamie, who becomes an artist and draws battle scenes during WWII, and of her wartime lover, Ruth, with asides about historic aviators (many of them women), and convincingly conveys her characters’ yearning for connection, freedom, and purpose. In a present-day narrative, film star Hadley Baxter, herself orphaned by a plane crash, is cast to portray Marian, an ambitious move for Hadley after having been known for her role in a Twilight-esque fantasy series. Shipstead manages to portray both Marian’s and Hadley’s expanded sense of consciousness as they push the boundaries inscribed around them—Marian’s through flight and Hadley’s through creative inspiration (a particularly colorful scene has her zooming on psychedelic mushrooms). This is a stunning feat. (May)



Read more...

KIRKUS REVIEWS

GREAT CIRCLE [STARRED REVIEW!]

Author: Maggie Shipstead 

Review Issue Date: January 15, 2021

Online Publish Date: December 26, 2020

Publisher: Knopf

Pages: 608

Price ( Hardcover ): $28.95

Publication Date: May 4, 2021

ISBN ( Hardcover ): 9780525656975

Section: Fiction

The intertwined journeys of an aviatrix born in 1914 and an actress cast to play her a century later.In a novel twice as long as and an order of magnitude more complex than the well-received Seating Arrangements (2012) and Astonish Me (2014), Shipstead reveals breathtaking range and skill, expertly juggling a multigenerational historical epic and a scandal-soaked Hollywood satire, with scenes playing out on land, at sea, and in the air. "We were both products of vanishment and orphanhood and negligence and airplanes and uncles. She was like me but wasn't. She was uncanny, unknowable except for a few constellations I recognized from my own sky": These are the musings of actress Hadley Baxter. She has been familiar with the story of Marian Graves, an aviatrix who disappeared while trying to circumnavigate the globe, since she was just a little girl—before she became a pop-culture phenomenon, turned into a movie star with a mega-franchise, accidentally destroyed her career, and was given the chance to reinvent herself...by playing Marian in a biopic. The film, Peregrine, is based at least partly on the logbook of Marian's "great circle," which was found wrapped in a life preserver on an ice floe near the South Pole. Shipstead's story begins decades earlier, with the christening of the Josephina Eterna in Glasgow in 1909. The unhappy woman who breaks the bottle on her bow, the laconic captain who takes the ship to sea, the woman he beds onboard, the babies that result from this union—Marian Graves and her twin, Jamie—the uncle who has to raise them when their mother drowns and their father disappears: The destinies of every one of these people, and many more unforgettable characters, intersect in ways that reverberate through a hundred years of story. Whether Shipstead is creating scenes in the Prohibition-era American West, in wartime London, or on a Hollywood movie set, her research is as invisible as it should be, allowing a fully immersive experience. Ingeniously structured and so damn entertaining; this novel is as ambitious as its heroines—but it never falls from the sky.

 

Link below and password: greatcircle


Read more...

Read more...