May 14, 2021
Maggie Shipstead’s “Great Circle” tracks the lives of Marian Graves who learns to fly as a teenager in 1920s Montana and dreams of circumnavigating the globe and the Hollywood star cast in her biopic a century later. The novel was inspired in part by the statue of pilot Jean Batten the author spotted at New Zealand’s Auckland Airport years ago. Shipstead, who grew up in Coto de Caza, is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and author of two previous novels, “Seating Arrangements” (2012) and “Astonish Me” (2014). She talks about writing and her own travel adventures.
AMELIA EARHART’S LAST FLIGHT
Often when we talk about a big, ambitious book, we reach for the language of geography. We describe the terrain it covers; we say that it sprawls, or ranges widely. The book is framed as a kind of passage through the world: we might talk about a protagonist’s journey, or an author’s exploration of a topic.
In award-winning author Maggie Shipstead’s new novel, all of those analogies are made literal.
Great Circle’s 600 pages span a full century and the entire planet. The book tells the story of Marian Graves, a fictional female pilot who disappeared in 1950 while attempting an unprecedented north-south circumnavigation of the earth. She had only one leg left in her trip, a final leap from Antarctica to New Zealand, when she vanished, Earhart-style, in the South Pacific. Shipstead takes readers through the events of Marian’s life leading up to that moment, from her parents’ doomed marriage and her unorthodox childhood, roaming semi-feral with her twin brother in the Mo